To span or not to span

[jschuricht]

I am in the planning stages for a capacity increase and am trying to decide the best method to mount the new array. Detailed specs can be found here. Basics are 24 1TB drives RAID6 adding 45 drive chassis starting with ~10 2TB drives RAID6 under 2008 server.

Optimally, everything would be accessible by one drive letter but I see potential issues in doing this. My thoughts are to span the two arrays under windows 22+16 for 38tb. The issue I foresee is in a few years when I want to replace the 1TB drives with larger ones. From what I have read and in my experiments, I cannot remove a drive from a windows span without braking it. Then there is the additional layer of fault induction added from the software span to consider.

So what would you do? One drive letter would make life easier, but I suppose I could brake things up as a A-M folder and a N-Z folder mounted under the same drive letter if necessary. The issue with multiple folders is the number of drives per array. I won't go over 24 as I am already pushing my luck so I would eventually end up splitting to more and more folders as I expand.

 

[xnoodle]

There's Junction but it doesn't solve most of your problems. I wish there was a way to implement mhddfs on a Windows platform.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx

If you were using some flavor of Linux, I'd tell you to use mhddfs

edit: Interesting. There's a project similar to Linux's FUSE called dokan and someone's implementing something similar called Intersect Drive but it's in pre-alpha stage.
http://www.vilett.com/disParity/forum/topic.php?id=59