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A question with Windows 7 Spanning drives
- Thread starter jordan12
- Start date
Sp33dFr33k
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Apr 20, 2002
- Messages
- 2,481
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.
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
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