Multiple Disks as one with fault tolerance? (Not RAID)

[quiky87]

I would like multiple Hard drives to appear as one big Hard drive without Doing RAID 0 or Dynamic Disk (Extended Partition) because if one drive fails in either of those arrays you lose everything. Is there a way to make multiple disks look like one big hard drive and if a drive fails only lose data on that one hard drive?

 

[canadian69]

Is there a way to make multiple disks look like one big hard drive and if a drive fails only lose data on that one hard drive?

Yes, its called RAID 5. Sorry dude. SAS RAID controllers seem to be the way to go these days.

 

[Paperdoc]

You can always use multiple disks as - separate multiple disks! Then when one goes you lose only its contents. However, you do have the inconvenience of specifying a drive letter at the start of a folder specification sequence.

Closest thing to what you want is, as canadian69 says, RAID5. Requires at least 3 matched HDD's, classic configuration is 5. Because of data redundancy, 5 HDD's gives you 4 HDD's of actual usable space. Lose one disk and you can replace it, then rebuild the entire dataset without loss but it takes time. Lose 2 disks almost simultaneously and you do lose everything! (Rare, but I saw it once - thank goodness the professional IT staff had a GOOD backup system used properly!) For that rare event you can consider RAID6. I do agree that RAID0 carries increased risk of losing it all, and for what I consider minimal performance benefit.

 

[canadian69]

Depending on your operating system version you may have a software RAID option as well. Forgot to mention that.