Merging multiple storage drives into one big virtual drive?

NachT

NachT

NachT

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20 May 2006
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Hi guys,

We've got a multipurpose server that we all share in our flat, and one of the feature is having centralised storage. It's got to that point where we have too many HDD's now and it's just not tidy.

I've been looking into making the disks dynamic within Windows, then creating Spanned Volumes on the disks, so within Windows it would appear as one big drive rather than 3 separate drives. I read one some site that creating spanned volumes across multiple drives lowers the reliability cos if one drive fails, the volume is inaccessible? I was under the impression if one of the drives failed, then that amount of storage would have dropped off the volume, and only the data on that drive would have been lost?

I was wondering if someone could clear this up for me please? If spanned volumes across multiple disks does indeed cause all data to be lost if one drive fails, if there an alternative method to do what i'm trying to do, but if one drive failed, only have that data lost and not the whole lot?

I don't understand why all the data would be lost, cause it's not like RAID0...

Ah well, hopefully someone can fill me in :3


Cheers guys
 
This is essentially what the original Windows Home Server does.

So long as you're using disks <2tb in size, this will work.

WHS2011 also now has some addons which will do the same as well.
 
A spanned volume has most of the of the disadvantages of RAID0 without any of the performance benefits. If a drive fails you will probably lose everything. It’s a historical relic that’s best ignored if you care about the data.

WHS managed the storage to that you didn’t need to worry about which drive the data was actually stored on. It didn't create spanned volumes.

There is the option of mounting drives into an empty NTFS folder rather than assigning separate drive letters (from within disk management). It should go some way towards meeting your needs, but it’s years since I’ve done it so the details are a bit hazy.
 
NachT said:
I was wondering if someone could clear this up for me please? If spanned volumes across multiple disks does indeed cause all data to be lost if one drive fails, if there an alternative method to do what i'm trying to do, but if one drive failed, only have that data lost and not the whole lot
Click to expand...

Losing any one disk will cause you to lose access to everything. It is a terrible idea and should never be used.

If you have access to Windows Server 2012, it now has something called Storage Spaces which is very cool. From Microsoft blurb:

Storage Spaces provides a new class of sophisticated virtualization enhancements to the storage stack that you can use to pool multiple physical hard disk units together and provide feature-rich, highly resilient, and reliable storage arrays to your workloads.

You can use Storage Spaces to create storage pools, which are virtualized administration units that are aggregates of physical disk units. With these storage pools, you can enable storage aggregation, elastic capacity expansion, and delegated administration. You can also create virtual disks with associated attributes that include a desired level of resiliency, thin or fixed provisioning, and automatic or controlled allocation on diverse storage media.

Storage Spaces delivers storage virtualization capabilities within Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. The storage stack has been fundamentally enhanced to incorporate two new abstractions:

Storage pools are a collection of physical disks. Pools permit storage aggregation, flexible capacity expansion, and delegated administration.

Storage spaces are virtual disks with associated attributes such as a desired level of resiliency, thin or fixed provisioning, automatic or controlled allocation on heterogeneous storage media, and precise administrative control.​


This is very very cool stuff. Server 2012 also has de-dupe, so you will gain back a certain amount of storage just by enabling it.
 
Cheers for all the info guys! That's much appreciated.

I'll have a look into this Storage Spaces on Server 2012, and if that's too complicated I'll just format with WHS and check out the storage management on that.

Thanks a lot guys :3

If anyone else has any other suggestions, I'll keep an eye on the thread.
 
Just thought i'd bump this, i've just been having a play with WS2012 over the past couple of days to check out the Storage Spaces feature mainly. From what i can tell, isnt it basically the same as dynamic discs? It doesnt seem to offer many additional features when only using one server box.

Sorry i know i took a while to get round to testing this, been a lil busy.

Could someone clarrify if its possible to achieve the kind of 'RAID' im after? I.e basically Striped, but instead of the data being spread accross the discs, its all stored on disc1 until this disc is full, then moves onto disc2?
 
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