how to make multiple drives appear "as one"?

skanky · 6 Mar 2007 at 09:15

if anyone could point me in the right direction that would be great: im building a fileserver for home, it'll have multiple hard drives of varying sizes, i want all the data on the drives to appear in windows as a single share.

ie, instead of \\SERVER\D$ and \\SERVER\E$ it'll be \\SERVER\ALL which will have everything on D/E drives appear as a share with D/E subfolders each containing its contents.

sort of how raid0 works, but dont want to raid0 and it wont work with drives of diffrent size anyway. i need it so that if one drive dies, the rest of the data/share is unaffected except for the data stored on that share.

is that feasible or should i just forget it and share them out as seperate drives to save hassle?

Rebelius · 6 Mar 2007 at 09:27

vista does it I think, with dynamic disks. I don't know the answers, but what you want to look for is JBOD array (Just a Bunch Of Disks)

Poolybit · 6 Mar 2007 at 09:34

What software are you going to be running on your server?

fumbles · 6 Mar 2007 at 10:13

JBOD, can be created with Dynamic Discs, or with a RAID controller.

Win2k => Vista whatever

Otherwise you can use junction points to mount different parts of the hdd to certain folders.

Ozymandias · 6 Mar 2007 at 10:24

You could look at Windows Home Server - no drive letters, all drives are pooled, folder duplication over separate drives, backup of attached machines etc.

skanky · 6 Mar 2007 at 10:47

it'll most likely run xp or vista, surely i can do this without needing a server OS, unless a server OS will do what i need better than the desktop OS's?

i looked at windows home server, but as far as i can make out, thats to be used as a monitorless terminal with it all controlled by web interface, i need this server to play media files as well as holding all the hdds so it needs to be a useable.

does JBOD work so if i drive fails then the rest still work?

ic1male · 6 Mar 2007 at 10:57

If one disk in a JBOD array fails, the whole volume fails.

skanky · 6 Mar 2007 at 11:06

oh thats no good then. :/

csmager · 6 Mar 2007 at 11:31

skanky said:
oh thats no good then. :/

And the way around it is to use a RAID solution (other than RAID0!) - which would require multiple discs of the same size.

Or the Windows Home Server solution, which doesn't care how many discs or of what size, but is about as efficient as RAID1 in terms of space usage (it duplicates everything).

Or it might be simpler to just live with separate drives.

Ozymandias · 6 Mar 2007 at 11:33

skanky said:
it'll most likely run xp or vista, surely i can do this without needing a server OS, unless a server OS will do what i need better than the desktop OS's?

i looked at windows home server, but as far as i can make out, thats to be used as a monitorless terminal with it all controlled by web interface, i need this server to play media files as well as holding all the hdds so it needs to be a useable.

does JBOD work so if i drive fails then the rest still work?

WHS will act as a media server if that is what want. Drive failure is not be a problem with WHS as long as the folders are duplicated. You don't need to duplicate all folders you can mix and match and vary it by user as well.

x1m · 6 Mar 2007 at 11:35

I'm fairly sure theres an option under disk managment to mount a hard drive as a folder on another? (No access to a windows pc right now)

csmager · 6 Mar 2007 at 11:36

x1m said:
I'm fairly sure theres an option under disk managment to mount a hard drive as a folder on another? (No access to a windows pc right now)

There is, but you'd still have to organise the space allocations yourself.

x1m · 6 Mar 2007 at 11:42

csmager said:
There is, but you'd still have to organise the space allocations yourself.

As he seems to want each drive to be independant anyway, I don't understand the necessity for a raid-esque layout? As far as I can see, the OP just wants all the drives to appear as one share - with just some shortcuts to each of the partitions.

LizardKing · 6 Mar 2007 at 11:46

Does the server need to run windows apps? as Linux can do this quite easily

squiffy · 6 Mar 2007 at 11:48

ic1male said:
If one disk in a JBOD array fails, the whole volume fails.

According to instructions in my DNS-323, a JBOD setup will only lose the data on the failed drive.

skanky · 6 Mar 2007 at 12:05

i will need to run windows apps, its going to need to play media files output to a telly.

reading a bit about WHS, it sounds like it could be what im after but it doesnt let me open a media player (wmp11 for example) and play files, does it?

Ozymandias · 6 Mar 2007 at 12:20

skanky said:
i will need to run windows apps, its going to need to play media files output to a telly.

reading a bit about WHS, it sounds like it could be what im after but it doesnt let me open a media player (wmp11 for example) and play files, does it?

It comes with wmp10 installed. However it's really intended that WHS serves the media to a client with say wmp11 on it.

skanky · 6 Mar 2007 at 12:56

Ozymandias said:
It comes with wmp10 installed. However it's really intended that WHS serves the media to a client with say wmp11 on it.

i need the machine to actually play the media file so i guess its totally out.

bledd · 6 Mar 2007 at 13:11

raid3 or raid5 is what you want

xfx revo 5port card does raid3 well, (one is used for backup, so you lose 1x drive of space) use the same size drives

csmager · 6 Mar 2007 at 13:14

bledd. said:
raid3 or raid5 is what you want

xfx revo 5port card does raid3 well, (one is used for backup, so you lose 1x drive of space) use the same size drives

I have one of these cards - no problems to report. They're dirt cheap - the reason being the chipset manufacturer (NetCell) has gone bust. This might be one thing to be wary of.