multiple hard drives -> one letter in Vista

drbenjamin

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Aug 2, 2007
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Guys

Hoping the [H] can help me out here, sorry if this is a FAQ but I've searched and can't find the answer
I have a W2K machine (Optiplex GX110!) set up as a PVR, running GB-PVR. It's getting a little long in the tooth so I thought I'd build a new machine. I'm planning to install Vista 32 on it, and use SATA drives. SATA is the main reason for the upgrade, along with the fact that I've crammed 4 hard drives in the machine and occasionally the power supply sends out a little smoke :D
Under W2K I use a feature called "Dynamic Drive", which I think is a version of Raid 0. What it does is allow me to have a single drive letter span multiple physical hard drives, and importantly, add additional drives whenever I want. There's no striping, just spanning multiple disks. I understand the risks involved, that I lose all my data if just one of the drives fails. I'm cool with that, it's just recorded TV shows. The ability to add drives is key, I expect my collection to keep growing.
What is the best way to achieve the same functionality under Vista? I gather that the Home version of Vista don't offer dynamic drives - which ones do? My guess is that a hardware Raid solution would only allow spanning of drives connected to the card, which means I'd need one with 4-6 controllers. Are there software solutions that offer this feature?
Any help appreciated!
 
I don't know of anything that will let you add additional drives to a stripe/span.

Rather than Stripe/Span, why not just mount the additional drives as folders within a drive - So create your main partition (d: for example) then rather than assigning drive letters to the other drives, mount them as "d:\Music", "d:\TV", "d:\Movies" etc. If you can fit all Movies on one drive, do "d:\Movies A-I" and "d:\Movies J-Z"

While you still won't get fault tollerance by default, it would be easy to increase capacity - Running out of space? Simply add a bigger drive, move stuff over, and mount it as a folder.

Drives can also be given drive letters and folder names - So when working on the server, you can see all the drive letters, and available capacity in explorer, but from a remote PC, you just see the one share, with multiple subfolders.

You also have the option later on to add bigger drives, and mirror them before adding to your folder structure - Tan way you can add fault tolerance for your critical data.

And that's basically how my media server evolved :)
 
Windows Home Server might be an option worth checking out, it will allow you to add additional drivers and share them as one entity, I don’t know how it would work locally as a PVR though...
 
Windows Home Server might be an option worth checking out, it will allow you to add additional drivers and share them as one entity, I don’t know how it would work locally as a PVR though...

If your PVR software is compliant with 2003 then you should have no issues.
 
Appreciate the help, guys. The software creates/deletes folders as it records shows, so I need to make the whole drive bigger; mounting a disk under a folder won't help, as the space wouldn't be used. I'll check into Server 2003, but it looks like it costs almost as much as Vista Ultimate, which is apparently the only version of Vista to offer disk spanning. I've learned that what I'm looking for is also called JBOD ("Just a bunch of disks"), but the controller cards I've found that offer more than 2 SATA connectors are more expensive than Vista Ultimate.

Any other suggestions are still welcome - I'm in no giant hurry here!
 
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