Intel ICHxR and JBOD

jellybeard999 · 7 Sep 2009 at 19:09

I'm interested in setting my Windows Server 2003 fileserver in JBOD, but have a few queries. I'm mainly interested to have the disks appear as a single drive. I have a seperate RAID1 array for critical files, which is backed up regularly.

I'm certain it is ok, but I can mix drives?
Can I add drives to the array at a later date (ie set up now with 5 disks, add a 6th later and the array increases in size, without any data loss or messing around)?
Can I remove a drive from the array with no impact to the rest of the array?
Can I remove a drive from the array and how would windows read that on a different non raid controller?
If I lose a drive, do I lose the data on that drive?
Are files split across disks?

Anything I've missed? Any advice?

jellybeard999 · 8 Sep 2009 at 07:37

Anyone in the morning crowd ?

EsaT · 8 Sep 2009 at 07:49

Don't start messing with RAID for that when you can mount drives/partitions as folders under existing drive labels.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307889

Surely makes drive failure recovery and changing HDDs lot easier when part of logical drive won't go missing...

jellybeard999 · 8 Sep 2009 at 12:18

I've currently got individual drives shared and mounted. It's just that firstly, I have ie 2x drives with movies, means I have to look in one first, then the other, secondly, I have a load of mounted drives.

Is there any way to consolidate the drives to one mounted drive ?