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A question with Windows 7 Spanning drives

J

jordan12

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Dec 29, 2000
Messages
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So if I span 4 drives into one single JBOD mode drive, what happens if I need to format my machine?

Will I lose the data in that spanned mode?
 
The Spanning is done at the drive/NTFS level, as long as you reinstall Windows 7 you SHOULD be fine, but I highly recommend a good backup of your data before formatting.
 
If you span them into one drive a format would delete all of your data. I would recommend installing the OS on one drive and using the other 3 for data. Then you can re-install Windows or format without worrying about the other drives.

Spanned volumes are not fault tolerant so if a drive fails you can lose the data.
 
Greetings

Loss of any one of the disks/partitions out of a spanned volume set technically leaves the whole spanned volume unusable, in practice some NTFS structures remain on the surviving disk/partitions however as its all pooled you don't know which disks/partitions it chooses to write files to.

If you actually want to do this and say you have four 3 TB drives you want to use this way then I suggest you partition the first drive like 200 GB = OS, programs, etc, etc and leave the other 2800 GB as free space, you can have a maximum of 32? disks OR partitions as a spanned volume set.

you then create a spanned volume set as 2800GB partition + 2nd drive + 3rd drive + 4th drive = 11.8 TB

This way if your OS becomes hosed you can reformat that 200GB and re-install the OS, I presume the new windows OS should recognise the spanned volume set and mount it again as one drive automatically. I suggest you try it by

(a) just installing an OS
(b) create the spanned volume set
(c) drop the 200GB OS partition
(d) re-install the OS on the 200GB partition,and
(e) see if it all still works (it should)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772180.aspx

Redundancy is a bit of a problem (specifically the lack of it in this case) so thats why most people would set up a ZFS Raid-Z1 in this situtation as their data would still be there even if one drive failed, but you would only have 9TB effective storage available in that case.

Cheers
 
I apologize, my comment was made assuming that there was a separate OS Drive from the 4 spanned drives.
 
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