Combine HDDs w/o RAID???

[mcdannej]

Here's the question...

Is there any way out there to combine multiple (6-10) physical hard drives, connected in a variety of ways (ide & usb) so that to windows they appear as one? I'm basically looking for a solution that will only risk the data on the individual drive (no spanning), and is just a logical trick. I've done it with Windows shortcuts, and some programs are fooled by this, but others only see the actual content of the folder. The problem you would otherwise have with such a scenario would be where does it write when it needs to right? This need only be a read only solution.

Here's the app...

I'm up to 2TB or so now of TV, movies and music, and I want programs like MCE or ORB to see one folder and see everything, no matter where it lies. Any ideas?

Thanks.

 

[michaelahess]

One way is to assign each drive a folder in the directory structure instead of a drive letter, it will only show the one c: drive, but each disk will be a folder. Or with nvraid for example, you can plug in 4 sata and 4 ide and do a JBOD array and have one large c: drive, if one disk dies you supposedly don't loose the data on the other drives but I've never tried it.

Best bet would be to take two drives, make them raid1 via windows, then make the rest of the drives a larger raid5 with the raid5 on xp trick and do it that way, course the drives will only use the capacity of the smallest.....but you can setup multiple arrays to use the left over space and then do the folder trick......

So basically there is no easy way to do it unless your drives are the same sizes

 

[mcdannej]

I'll look into the assigning the drives to a folder issue a bit more, I'd forgotten about that trick. I don't know if it will cut it, but some investigation should answer that.

Really, the more I think about it, what I really want is the shortcutting I've done in Windows to REALLY stick. The shortcutting allows me to rearrange (into Comedy, Drama, Etc), w/o having to worry about where every actually resides. Some programs fall for it, but ORB in particular is not falling for it. If there are any tips out there to make the shortcutting work more effectively I'd love to hear them too.

 

[Codesmith]

You just go to disk managment -> change drive letter and paths for the hard drive and you have the option to mount it to an empty folder on any NTFS partion.

The fact that a subfolder is actually another partition is hidden from the application so there shouldn't be any problems.


You even use both Drive letters and NTFS folde rmounting.

Just remember to unmount the folder before removing the drive or you may get stuck with a NTFS folder that is nearly impossible to delete!