Help setting up drive array

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WCES Ryan

Gawd
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Mar 28, 2005
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Hi all, been a while since I posted, but I need some help with this...

I have 2 hard drives that I would like to set up to appear as one continuous volume in Windows. One of them is a 500gb, the other is a 1000gb, both Western Digital.

I haven't figured out yet how I am going to be able to best accomplish this. I know I can do it in Windows (running XP Pro) as well as via my motherboard.

It doesn't need to be particularly high performance. It is just storage for downloaded files.

If I could configure it so that a drive would be able to fail without losing the data on the rest of the array, that would be ideal as well. I would take this option over performance.

Lastly, if there is a way that I can configure this without losing what is currently on the drives, that would be awesome. I am having trouble right now finding the space so that I can move everything off of the drives in order to set the array up and copy it back.

Thanks in advance to those who help :)
 
There is no way you can do what you are looking for without losing your current data or preventing the loss of data in the future.
 
you can setup the drives as jbod array and it will show up as 1 big volume, also if 1 drive dies you will only loose data that was on that drive. That is pretty much your only option, not many choices when you only have 2 drives and they are not the same size.
 
axan said:
you can setup the drives as jbod array and it will show up as 1 big volume, also if 1 drive dies you will only loose data that was on that drive. That is pretty much your only option, not many choices when you only have 2 drives and they are not the same size.
Click to expand...
That sounds like it should work. Will I lose the data on the drives when I set up that array?
 
yes you will loose all current data when u set up jbod.
 
if you don't want to do a JBOD array, one option is to initialize one of the disks as a Dynamic disk, and then configure your C:\ to be extended onto the second drive. The drawback to this is that once initialized as a Dynamic Disk, you cannot set it back to a regular partition. The only machine that will be able to read that disk is the one you initialize it on...which is your current machine. If the board fails, or you change the drive controller, you will break the "array" so to speak. Here's what I suggest:


500GB Drive - Boot drive.
1000GB Drive - two partitions. Make 1 partition the same size as the 500GB drive (note that a 500GB drive isn't giving you 500,000MB of space...it's less). Whatever Windows shows for the capacity of the 500GB drive, make a partition on the 1TB drive of equal size. Get an imaging program like Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image, or something else. Make a disk clone on the 1st 500GB partition of your physical 500GB disk (C:\). Run your backups as often as you feel comfortable with (because it'll make your computer unusable during the process of backing up). After the first full clone is done, you can do incremental backups from there. This way, if either disk dies, you can remove it, and boot from the cloned copy. Use the remaining disk space to create a second partition for file storage/shares/whatever.

The good news is, this will give you redundancy on your boot partition. The bad news is, you have to allow the backups to run, or it's useless. Also, note that you're banking on the 500GB drive being the first to fail. If the 1TB disk fails...you'll lose your storage partition as well as your imaged boot partition. Really, the best bet would be to buy another 500GB or another 1TB disk, and setup a RAID 1 array for full redundancy. However, your write performance suffers a bit in RAID 1, and you'd have to buy another identical disk.

Note: the suggested partitions above are just to simplify the explaination. By all means, you can set the partitions to whatever size you need/like. I would suggest 1 partition for boot/installed programs on the first drive, and a partition of the same size on the second drive. They need not be 500GB each, necessarily.
 
Thanks for the reply, that helps a lot.

I should mention that I also have 2 250gb drives as well. One is the system drive, the other contains the My Documents folder. Therefore I'm free to do with the larger two hard drives what I please.

Both the 500gb and 1000gb drives are already dynamic disks. I found a site that explained how to set up a spanned or striped volume in Windows, but when I went to create a new volume on the 1000gb, it didn't give me the option. I assumed this was because the 500gb drive needed to be unallocated space that could be allocated for the spanned volume. Am I wrong about this? Is there another way to set this up (once again keeping in mind that I'd like if possible to do it without getting rid of what is currently on the 500gb drive)?
 
Well, I guess having all of the information from the outset would have been ideal...but oh well. Your best bet then is to have the 2x250GB drives as a boot volume, in a RAID1 for redundancy. I'd recommend setting those two in RAID 1 (if you want redundancy on the boot volume) or RAID 0 (if you want speed, but no redundancy). Of course, do this after moving all of your data from the 250's to the larger drives. As far as your My Documents folder goes, this can just as easily be moved (or actually, redirected) to any storage that is accessible, whether it's on a Network drive, external storage, USB key, or internal drive, Windows doesn't really care. My Documents can either exist inside your profile, or as you have it, on another device, or machine. It would be no biggie to set a RAID volume for boot, and point My Documents to space on the Dynamic Disk volumes.

Once you go to a dynamic disk, and set up your rules, you're pretty much done. For instance, if you have the 1TB drive as main storage, and the 500GB drive as your "overflow" from the 1TB drive, then neither drive can support new partitions. When you initialized them as dynamic disks, and set the rules, that's it. If you intend to have them this way, then just leave them. If you wanted to define more partitions on them...you're not going to be able to until you re-initialize them, and create new partitions, and format those partitions...which gets back to the fact that you don't want to lose the data that you have.

It all really depends on what you want to accomplish. Maybe if I haven't yet answered your questions, you should post up what disks you have, and the board or RAID controller that is supporting these disks...and then tell us what you want to accomplish, instead of giving half of the information, and asking a question that may not give you the solution you were hoping for. I didn't mean any of that to sound rude at all, just as a note going forward...and don't worry, we all do it. :rolleyes: Good luck, and let me know if there's anything else I can help with.
 
Yeah, my bad. I didn't mention the 250gb drives as I don't have any plans to include them in this setup, I was just focused on my larger two drives.

I'm still confused about what to do in disk manager. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but I still can't find a way to create a spanned volume, or define any rules. Do I need to have unallocated space on more than one drive before I have that option?

I deleted the volume on the 1000gb drive, converted it back to basic, back to dynamic and created another volume and still didn't see anywhere to create a span.

Motherboard btw is Asus A8N-SLI Premium. It has a Silicon Image controller built in and it has NVRaid as well.

</confused>
 
Why don't you keep things simpler/safer and convert them back to basic disks, and mount one disk as a folder within the other (or both into a subfolder of your OS drive somewhere) That way you don't add drive letters, use windows retarded dynamic disks, or possibly lose more data than you would if one drive blew up and screwed up the dynamic disk layout.
 
I got it... all I had to do was click my existing volume (the 500gb) and go to extend. From there I added the space from the 1000gb and I was good to go. No data loss. All this trouble for nothing.

The sad thing is that I was triyng to make space to move everything off the 500gb so I could set the array up. I deleted a ton of crap that I could have kept :(. Not important stuff, but now it's stuff I don't have anymore.
 
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