Adding Drives to existing JBOD?

King107s · Feb 12, 2013

Hey guys,

I'm planning out a future HTPC and to save money I'm only going to buy half of drives I intend on using up front because it will take a while for me to fill them.

I had planned on just using JBOD to span the drives so as to search the libary seamlessly but I had concerns over future expansion of the JBOD array... Can the array be expanded without risking the existing data? The amount of data will be huge so a backup isn't really possible without the investment of a lot more HDD's and would kind of defeat the initial purpose of up-front cost saving.

I'm open to other options and opinions as well.

Automata · Feb 12, 2013

Your question doesn't make any sense. JBOD means you are accessing the drives individually. There is no array to add to.

Whether or not you can expand a SPAN array depends on the controller.

King107s · Feb 13, 2013

I understand what JBOD is, I was just refering to the span of drives in JBOD as an array and I guess thats an incorrect description. It would just be an intel controller on an H77 board.

King107s · Feb 14, 2013

So does anyone have any experience with doing this that they can share?

I.M.O.G. · Feb 14, 2013

I did the same thing, and took the same approach. Bought more drives as I saw deals and had the extra cash.

How do you intend to logically group the disks in your OS?

For example to make it all work like one drive, you could create a library in windows 7, and just include each drive in the library.

As another example, in my array I have 6 2TB drives, 2 internal and 4 external in a USB3.0 enclosure. These are all just separate disks in Windows. However since I use XBMC for my HTPC, and Plex Media Server for accessing it when I'm away from my HTPC, I use media libraries in both. Its transparent in the applications - doesn't matter which disk the movie is on, I just go to movies and it lists all my stuff on every drive.

If one drive fails, I lose all the movies I had on it. If I add a drive, I just plug it in and add it to the proper library. There's no risk of losing data by adding drives like this.

I think it would be best, since you aren't doing any kind of RAID, to just leave all the disks independent as far as Windows is concerned, and group them by libraries within your media center app.

I hope this helps.

King107s · Feb 14, 2013

I.M.O.G. said:
I did the same thing, and took the same approach. Bought more drives as I saw deals and had the extra cash.

How do you intend to logically group the disks in your OS?

For example to make it all work like one drive, you could create a library in windows 7, and just include each drive in the library.

As another example, in my array I have 6 2TB drives, 2 internal and 4 external in a USB3.0 enclosure. These are all just separate disks in Windows. However since I use XBMC for my HTPC, and Plex Media Server for accessing it when I'm away from my HTPC, I use media libraries in both. Its transparent in the applications - doesn't matter which disk the movie is on, I just go to movies and it lists all my stuff on every drive.

If one drive fails, I lose all the movies I had on it. If I add a drive, I just plug it in and add it to the proper library. There's no risk of losing data by adding drives like this.

I think it would be best, since you aren't doing any kind of RAID, to just leave all the disks independent as far as Windows is concerned, and group them by libraries within your media center app.

I hope this helps.

Thanks! Like you said, I was trying to retain some transparency and simplicity without the increased risk of drive failure in RAID. How big is your windows + XMBC partition?

I.M.O.G. · Feb 14, 2013

Each drive has only one partition in my setup. The OS drive is an old 36GB raptor, all the rest are random 2TB storage drives. Like this:

C: 36GB (Windows and all Apps)
D: 2TB (Movies)
E: 2TB (TV)
F: 2TB (Movies)
G: 2TB (Movies)
H: 2TB (Movies)
I: 2TB (Movies)

So all drives are separate partitions in windows.

Then in XBMC I just go to Videos>Files>"Add Videos". That brings up a dialog, and I added drives "D" through "I" as video sources, and set their type appropriately to either TV or Movie. After doing that, all the drive contents show up under the Movies or TV library.

This is simple, but offers no security. It would be better for the data to use RAID5.

Adding Drives to existing JBOD?

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