Storage Pools, Spanning, JBOD???

Thook07

Honorable
Nov 18, 2012
5
0
10,510
Hey guys,

I am getting very frustrated scouring the internet for what I think should be an "easy" problem to fix. (I am sure i am incorrect about the "easy" part). I will start off with my current setup

--Current Setup--

I have 2 4 bay hard drive enclosures.

-----Bay 1
---------1 TB
---------2 TB
---------1.5 TB
---------2 TB
For a total of 6.5 TB (Yes i understand its not exactly 6.5 TB with the overhead)

-----Bay 2
---------3 TB
---------3 TB
---------2 TB
---------2 TB
For a total of 10 TB

I have these both of these bays plugged into the same computer (current OS: Windows 7 Ultimate).

*Note the data on these drives is just movies,photos,programs, etc. I can stand to lose the data on these bays.

--Problem--

When i plug both of these bays into my computer i get 8 new drive under my computer.

--Solution I am looking for--
A way to combine the hard drives in each bay to make them act like each bay is one hard drive. (Essentially i would have 2 hard drives 1 of 6.5TB (Bay 1) and 1 of 10 TB (Bay 2)

Now I understand that I could span them together, but I am not exactly sure if that is what I want to happen. Because what concerns me is the recovery features (or lack there of) when one of the hard drives in the array fails. Lets take the 2nd Bay for example, If one of the 2tb hard drives failed, I would theoretically still have 8tbs of usable data. So one question would be... How difficult is it to recover this 8 tbs of data from one failed hard drive?

Ideally what i would like is some program that sits between my enclosures and Windows My Computer that is combining these hard drives. I really dont care about redundancy and the performance isnt really that important either. I really just want My Computer to look "clean".

Is there any program out there that you guys would recommend that may help solve my problem?

Thanks for reading and thanks in advance for any response you guys can give...

-Taylor