raid help?

[blaze15301]

ok i got a bunch of hardrives sitting around and i was wondering if there is something around that wil allow me to use a bunch of different hardrives as one something like is listed on this page

http://www.thermaltakestore.com/n0010015.html


there it is listed as big. it basically combines several hardrives into one big one.


thanks for the help everyone.

[Drum Thumper]

More information please: Namely, how many hard drives are we talking about and what are their sizes?

And motherboard information would be helpful too.

There's a couple of different ways of going about doing this, and like any seasoned tech geek, I have learned that hardware trumps software any day of the week.

[blaze15301]

i have a seagate 500 gb,1tb,160gbs,and a 120 that i would like to put into use. i have a the gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P. id like to try and use all these drives as one so my data is in one convenient location for me to find.

[Luke122]

WHS maybe? (Windows Home Server) That's the only thing I can think of atm that would let you pool the drives into one large volume.. maybe FreeNAS would do that too?

Otherwise, just plug them all in and dedicate one to music, one to photos, one to video, etc.

[mDust]

You can do this for free in Windows, assuming that's what you're running.

Hit start key + r and type diskmgmt.msc in the run box and then enter.
This pops up:

I shrank my backup disk (disk1) for this example. If you decide to do this, you should have several unformatted disks in this view. While leaving your boot disk alone, format one of your new disks. When done, right click it and hit 'extend volume'.

The extend volume wizard will popup and once you click next you will be at this screen:

As long as the rest of your new disks are unallocated, you should see them listed on the left. Select them and hit 'add'. Then hit the next button and wait a bit. After a moment it should dump back to the disk management window and should look similar to my disk1:

This is a JBOD configuration which stands for Just a Bunch Of Disks. Windows cannot install or boot from this configuration...which is why you must leave your boot disk alone.

Good luck!

[x88x]

Yup, what you're looking for is a JBOD configuration, like mDust mentioned. Since your drives are all different capacities, that's really the only way to get what you're looking for. There are a number of different software methods to do this (varies depending on your OS), and some RAID controllers even have a JBOD function.

As Drum Thumper mentioned, hardware control will always be faster than software control. That being said, I ended up settling on a software RAID for my fileserver because a) it's not dependent on a specific RAID controller, b) I can use drives on multiple RAID controllers (currently using 4 drives on the onboard and 2 on a PCI controller), c) I don't really need blazing fast speeds for a fileserver (they're all low-RPM drives anyways), and last but definitely not least, d) it's free.

[blaze15301]

yes they are set up as jbob now. this is for my desktop i have windows 7 ultimate 64 bit

[mDust]

yes they are set up as jbob now. this is for my desktop i have windows 7 ultimate 64 bit

Then you're set. All that 'big' mode is is JBOD. RAID doesn't work for different sized drives as it will make all the drives the same size as the smallest drive in the array. It also will only run as fast as the slowest drive...so there are no advantages to be had in performance in your case.

[blaze15301]

thank you all very much for the help. you guys are more helpful and a bit nicer then the guys over at toms.