Ok, I have four hard drives, two connected to the mother board, two connected to a scsi bus. I want all four HDs to appear and be used as one large volume, instead of four seperate ones. Is there some kind of software that can do this for me? Or perhaps through windows?
Also, JBOD will work for you. It's good at combining a bunch of odd sized HDD's... If all your HD's are the same capacity, I'd go with RAID, but if they aren't... JBOD is your logical solution.
Here read this from wiki
Quote:Concatenation (JBOD)
Although a concatenation of disks (also called JBOD, or "Just a Bunch of Disks") is not one of the numbered RAID levels, it is a popular method for combining multiple physical disk drives into a single virtual one. As the name implies, disks are merely concatenated together, end to beginning, so they appear to be a single large disk.
In this sense, concatenation is akin to the reverse of partitioning. Whereas partitioning takes one physical drive and creates two or more logical drives, JBOD uses two or more physical drives to create one logical drive.
In that it consists of an Array of Independent Disks (no redundancy), it can be thought of as a distant relation to RAID. JBOD is sometimes used to turn several odd-sized drives into one useful drive. Therefore, JBOD could use a 3 GB, 15 GB, 5.5 GB, and 12 GB drive to combine into a logical drive at 35.5 GB, which is often more useful than the individual drives separately.
JBOD is similar to the widely used Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and Logical Storage Manager (LSM) in UNIX and UNIX-based operating systems (OS). JBOD is useful for OSs which do not support LVM/LSM (like MS-Windows, although Windows 2003 Server, Windows XP Pro, and Windows 2000 support software JBOD, known as spanning dynamic disks). The difference between JBOD and LVM/LSM is that the address remapping between the logical address of the concatenated device and the physical address of the disc is done by the RAID hardware instead of the OS kernel as it is LVM/LSM.
One advantage JBOD has over RAID 0 is in the case of drive failure. Whereas in RAID 0, failure of a single drive will usually result in the loss of all data in the array, in a JBOD array only the data on the affected drive is lost, and the data on surviving drives will remain readable. However, JBOD does not carry the performance benefits which are associated with RAID 0.
i7 3770 12GB ram terrabyte sata drive 1 750Gb sata drive 285GTX graphics Sony dvdwriter same NZXT Nemesis case
Still playing Black Hawk Down why did I upgrade?
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 21. April 2006 @ 01:40
The chipset manufacturer of your board (e.g. ATI, Nvidia, SIS, Nvidia or ULI) usually has a raid utility if it's compatible that should let you use JBOD. If not, then try looking around the Acronis website.
I am trying to do the same thing, but according to microsoft, you cannot upgrade a basic scsi disk to a dynamic disk if its on a shared bus, which is my problem. I just found this thread and acutally posted my questions and findings here in the software forum since I 1st wanted to just use windows for JBOD
If you guys can help me I would appreciate it. I only have 2 small scsi drives, each 5G and I want a 10G volume. I cannot use anything than RAID 0 because I don't care for fault tolerance and only have 2 drives.