Merge many hard drives to one volume

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Frixzon

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Oct 18, 2014
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I have spent a long time this evening to solve my problem but no luck. my problem is that I need to get my hard drives to look like one. RAID0 is no solution when data will be lost. In some way i want to fool the operating system to think its just one volume. when a hdd is full it begins to stored data on the next hdd, etc. It has to work some how?
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The operating system I'm running is Windows Server 2012.
 
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Someone Somewhere

Someone Somewhere

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Sep 23, 2012
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Um. This is a server. And you're running single drives without backups. I don't think I can stress how bad this is.

First: Go back up all your data, twice. Take one copy offsite. Then look into getting a real backup solution set up.

Second: Get probably 5x4TB drives, and put them in RAID6. This should give you ~11.5TiB of usable space, in one volume. Move all the data from your existing drives onto there.

I'd also suggest mirroring your OS disk.
 
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Frixzon

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Sure that would be a nice thing.
Backup is still not necessary for me yet but maybe in future time depending on stored data.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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An 'answer', depends on exactly what you are trying to do.

So far, you've said "In some way i want to fool the operating system to think its just one volume."

'How', depends a lot on why and what you are actually trying to do.
 
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Solandri

Solandri

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Jan 4, 2012
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What you want is called JBOD - Just a Bunch Of Disks. It combines all your drives into a single volume. There's no attempt at striping, so if a drive dies you only lose the data on that drive.

In Windows Server 2012, you can set it up via Storage Spaces. I haven't done it myself so that's all the guidance I can give. But do listen to what the people above are telling you. You badly need to regularly backup your files if you value your data. The more drives you have, the higher the probability that any one drive will die.
 
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Frixzon

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Oct 18, 2014
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I reall want for some reason to se some of the disks as one. The problem is that I do not have the resources to be able to run raid which I really would like to have.

Solandri wrote what i want:
It combines all your drives into a single volume. There's no attempt at striping, so if a drive dies you only lose the data on that drive.
Click to expand...

For example i would like to have disk G and D showing a space together.

Thanks for all quick answers btw! :)
 
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Frixzon

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Oct 18, 2014
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I know that one but i think you need to format the drives you want to create a spanned volume of?
Meybe there is no need to this in the end anyway, I thought it was an interesting question whether there actually was going to make a virtual disk of two physical disks with no need of format the disks. Your wise advice says I should try to gather resources to be able to have some kind of raid instead.
 
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Someone Somewhere

Someone Somewhere

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I believe you should be able to add empty disks to an existing span, without deleting the data in the span.

As such, you should only need one extra drive to do that. Span your new drive and E, then move data from an existing drive to the span, then clear that drive and add it. Repeat until all your drives (excluding OS) are in the span.

Note that this is pretty data-risky, and only worth considering for very unimportant data.
 
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