Concatenation

jhawkmike said:

I have a couple of questions about drive spanning. Let's say we are spanning 4 500GB drives together to create a 2 terabyte volume:

1) How is the data distributed? Does it get spread across the drives somewhat evenly, or does drive 2 not get used until drive 1 is full? If it's the latter, then does that make defragmentation difficult? I remember once trying to defrag a drive that was almost full, and I couldn't do it.

2) If one of the drives fails, do you lose all the data, or just the data on the drive that failed? If it's the latter, how would you go about figuring out which files you lost?

I appreciate the help.

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jhawkmike said:

Thanks for the response thideras, but I'm not talking about RAID0. I'm asking about spanning, not striping.

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Spanning: If a user wishes to obtain all the capacity of the drives in an array, he may also choose to "span" (merge) the drives. In this configuration disks storage space will be placed sequential where the operating system sees just one huge disk. Unfortunately, there are no other benefits except capacity with the spanning solution.

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nd4spdbh2 said:

i think he is talking more about JBOD which essientally makes the OS see one drive comprised of the combined storage set. no raid at all. im not entirely sure how it fills up but it would probably start with the first disk specified.

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