Jbod? Raid? what should i do! :*(

[Deleted member 329]

hello folks.

i have a problem which sees me stepping into a field which i am unfamiliar and could really use some practical advise from people who know what’s what! lol

The problem I have is that i have several hard drives. 320gig 250gig and 160gig. what i want to do is be able to use them as one drive. I would like to be able to share the drive over a network as one drive for use with XBMC and the rest of my network.

so ive been looking at JBOD and Raid and am still really unsure of how to proceed.

it seems like i cant use raid because all the disks are different manufacturers and sizes.

performance is an issue but access doesn’t really need to be faster than accessing a single drive at a time.

The single most important issue would be loss of data. I want to use a setup that if one of the drives goes down i only loose the information on that drive.

thanks in advance for your help!

 

[rpstewart]

The easiest way of doing it is just using Windows dynamic volumes, you could either span the data across all three disks, using disk 1 until it's full, the disk 2 and then disk 3. In theory if disk 2 dies then the other 2 should be fine but it's not something I've had to deal with. The other alternative is to mount disks 2 & 3 as paths on disk 1 - this is probably the easiest as you know exactly what is on each disk and you can boot from disk 1 which I'm not sure you can do with a spanned volume.