Expanding Storage Easily?

[csmager]

I was unsure whether to put this in GH or Hard Disk Drives, but figured that as it was a more generally storage issue rather than an HD issue, it should go in here. If I'm wrong, please feel free to move.

I have a couple of 'servers' that are essentially identical - so I have access to the same content at University in our student house, and when I go home. It also helps to have a bit of redundancy.

My problem is disc space. For example, I have a 300Gb drive which has around 5Gb space left on it. I could buy another 300Gb drive (I have the space, and the SATA capacity), but then I'd just have two shared network drives. One would still be full.

Is there anyway I can easily add extra space and let software or hardware decide where to put specific files - so the appearance to the end user is one collosal 600Gb drive?

I know this can be achieved from the offset with RAID, but is it possible to expand this once set up, as I'm suggesting?

Any suggestions as to how to proceed would be greatly appreciated. And perferably not too expensive(!)

Thanks

 

[Andre]

You could create a mount point for the second drive - so it appears as a subdirectory on the first drive. You could then move things around to even out the space.

I think that is the easiest way to do things in Windows, when one of the drives already has stuff on it.

There may also be the option of JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Discs) RAID, but I am unsure whether you need to reformat or not for that

 

[csmager]

I do that already on one drive. It still means I'd have to manually move stuff about to even the space.

I thought of JBOD, but I still haven't found if it's possible to expand it as I'm suggesting. I'm rather hoping it is.

As I essentially have two copies of the Data, and it's not really very important, I can't really see the point in me using a RAID setup. RAID0 would be daft, RAID1 is an incredible waste, and RAID5 costs a fortune to do properly (with hardware controllers).

I'll keep googling around the JBOD idea...

 

[csmager]

Success - Windows has a feature called Dynamic Discs. It essentially allows you to span partitions across multiple drives, basically allowing you to do what I need.

No redunancy, apart from the fact the two servers are synced...