Question about spanned volumes in XP

A

abe2000

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Jan 5, 2003
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Hey!

I'm about to buy a few more disks, but I dont want a million partitions in windows, so I was thinking about spanning them. But the question is, how easy is it to recover the data when one disk dies?

I'm going to span 7 disks, so it's kind of important that all data (1.2tb) is not lost if one disk dies. (and no, I dont want Raid5)

3x Maxtor 250GB SATA (new)
3x Seagate 160GB IDE
1x IBM 75GXP 76.8GB IDE (over 5 years and still working ;)

Yes.. the IBM is probably very risky to have in the volume. I've felt like it's a ticking bomb for years now, but if it's easy to recover the data, I don't see the problem.

Maybe you can recommend me a good (and hopefully free/cheap) recovery software. And it would be very nice if it could reconstruct the volume with the rest of the data still on it, or make individual partitions on the disks. I dont want something where I have to copy all the data to other disks, 'cause I dont have the space for that.

Thank you in advance.
 
No answer? ;(

I changed my mind anyway. I'm going to buy two extra disks and have two raid5 arrays.

4x 250gb and 4x 160gb

So my next question is, it should be no problem spanning these volumes, right? If a disk dies, I'll rebuild the raid array with a new disk and the spanned volume should be up again.

This way, I'll never loose any data unless two disks on the same array dies, right!? :)
 
Yep, that should work. This is sort of a raid 50 array, but with jbod instead of raid 0. I guess that makes it a 5J array. As for actually recovering stuff from it, it'll be difficult and expensive. Just like always.

 
You wont lose data to physical drive failures unless two disks on the same array die before you rebuild it. However Raid is not a replacement for backing up data. Raid gaurantees uptime, back ups gaurantee data integrity. A raid-5 array has a single master file table for the whole array - that's a single point of failure. Also, you can still lose data to corruption without having any drives fail.
Backing up hundres of GB is a pain in the ass even with DVDs, once Blu-ray/HD-dvd comes out though, shouldnt be as much of a hassle.
 
The single MFT thing is true of Windows filesystems (so far, anyways) although I think both fat32 and ntfs have a backup copy of the MFT. This is not globally true in Linux, though; XFS in particular divides the filesystem into chunks called "allocation groups"; the default is to make 8 chunks, but since the maximum size of an AG is 4gb, file systems usually end up with many more chunks than this. Each AG is more or less independent of the others; running a file system checker on half a filesystem should give you pretty good results compared to ntfs or something.

Ext2/3 also store multiple copies of the superblock, its word for the MFT.

 
I know about the filesystem weaknesses, but I've never had any problems with that.

I have had disks die on me though, so Raid5 is a huge improvement IMO.

Thanks for answering my question!
 
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