windows options for a large disk effect?

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paradoxblue

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Jan 4, 2006
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I have so far 3 500gig drives on my server pc. running windows xp
Now i share these through folder sharing to my other pc's for media viewing

I am trying to figur eout if there is an easy way to have all my files appear on a single drive.

Mainly on the other pc's i dont care if they are multiples on the main server pc.
is there a way to tie them into one output.. or something?

am i making any sense? lol
 
Yes, you are making sense.

You have several options for combining several disks into 1. You can do a little background research by searching for Raid. Use the articles on Wikipedia to start.

If you have your OS on a separate drive, then your options are much simpler. Also, converting your drives to JBOD or Raid 0 could be destructive to your data, so research carefully before you start.

Don
 
i am aware of jbod and raid, also aware that it will involve formatting..
This is where my problem is.
Of the drives only 1 is empty the other two are full. so i have no where to transfer my data too.

so i am trying to find a way to have it just appear as one on my other pc's...
 
Well if you go into disk management under XP or Vista, you can instead of assigning a drive letter to the empty drive, make it a directory that is listed under one of your other drives. But that doesn't distribute the space any different than having separate drives. But it will let you seem to have only 1 drive.
 
yeah i had seen that option. but instead of having multiple drives i would have multiple folders.

if i go with jbod. am i able to add more disks to it?

example
if i go JBOD with 2x500 empty;s
and fill them, If I have another empty 500 later on. can I add it to the jbod without having to format the already setup disks?
 
I would first try LurkerLito's idea because loosing just one drive in your JBOD setup will cause complete data loss of the disk that failed.

Either go Raid5 (1 drive failure tolerance), or WHS as an OS (which can be data loss tolerant if you use data duplication).

Both my ideas destroy the current data.
 
yeah thats my problem
so i may wait till i can get 4 drives, do a raid, than transfer them over

if i go raid 5. with 4 drives. i will get 3 and one will be a redundant no?
 
paradoxblue said:
yeah thats my problem
so i may wait till i can get 4 drives, do a raid, than transfer them over

if i go raid 5. with 4 drives. i will get 3 and one will be a redundant no?
Click to expand...

Yeah, you will get 3 drives worth of usable space, and if any of the drives go out, once you replace it with another drive, it will rebuild it. Also, it can be one large drive letter. And, if the raid controller supports it, you can add additional drives down the road, and the controller will redistribute the data automatically without having to reformat it.

So, if you have one empty now, you can buy two more, and make the 3 drives into a raid 5 array which will give you 2 drives of usable space. Then once you copy your other two 500GB drives over to it, format the two drives that had your data and add them to the array.

That is the route I was going to take, but the raid controller cards I wanted started at about 400.00. I have decided instead to go with Windows Home Server and put all my hard drives in a seperate case, keeping it a ventilated closet where all the Cat5 and RJ45 cables that run through my house terminate. It's also where I keep my cable modem and router.
 
^I agree.

But take note: I noticed that expanding the RAID5 array (or migrating it) takes a VERY long time.
On my 3ware 9650SE controller it goes at a rate of about 3-4MiB/s so a large array could take weeks.
During that time if a drive fails data is pretty much gone...
(I will test the speeds more, but I saw others complaining to)
 
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