Multiple physical disks -> 1 Virtual Disk, no raid?

[FrozenDevl]

I've been researching this a bit, and can't find the answer.
Is it possible to have multiple physical hard drives act as 1 drive in windows, without using a raid? I know that if I do a raid, if one of the drives dies they are all useless....or I will have to give up a lot of space for backup.
So is it possible to get windows to recognize multiple disks as one disk, in a way that won't kill all the drives if one fails?

If this isn't possible, what raid would be best for easy storage (like that of a Drobo), where if one disk fails the others will still work fine. I was thinking Raid5, but not sure.

 

[eagleknight]

Windows Home Server does this with drive pooling. v1 has drive extender and allows you to turn on duplication incase a drive fails. Vail (v2) this feature was removed, but some third-party options are popping up for an add-in.

 

[FrozenDevl]

Windows Home Server does this with drive pooling. v1 has drive extender and allows you to turn on duplication incase a drive fails. Vail (v2) this feature was removed, but some third-party options are popping up for an add-in.

Is it possible to do this with Windows 7 Ultimate? As this is also going to be my primary machine.

 

[xnoodle]

If you don't need merged directories you can use something like mklink for directory junctions.

If you need merged directories, then flexraid view can do the trick.
In the Linux world you can use something like mhddfs/unionfs

 

[FrozenDevl]

If you don't need merged directories you can use something like mklink for directory junctions.

If you need merged directories, then flexraid view can do the trick.
In the Linux world you can use something like mhddfs/unionfs

Going to look into flexraid, seems like it can do exactly what I want. Thanks for this, now for more research

 

[treadstone]

Have a look at FlexRAID v2.0, the GUI has come a long way and makes setting up your system a breeze. All you need for your implementation is the 'storage pool' option (previously known as the FlexRAID-View). Merge the drives, files and/or directories you would like to see as a virtual drive together and you are all set. In the future, if you want to add a bit of protection to the mix, you can also use the same software to 'RAID' the drives to create parity data for protection purposes.

 

[FrozenDevl]

Have a look at FlexRAID v2.0, the GUI has come a long way and makes setting up your system a breeze. All you need for your implementation is the 'storage pool' option (previously known as the FlexRAID-View). Merge the drives, files and/or directories you would like to see as a virtual drive together and you are all set. In the future, if you want to add a bit of protection to the mix, you can also use the same software to 'RAID' the drives to create parity data for protection purposes.

Just to make sure, does this work like a raid, as far as if a disk fails, it takes down all the others disks data as well? Or I just lose the data on that one physical disk?

 

[treadstone]

FlexRAID gives you a few different options:

- Snapshot RAID: Manually or Scheduled parity calculation, updates parity when invoked manually or via the scheduler at predetermined times.
- Realtime RAID: Similar to a normal RAID, will update parity on the fly when data changed.
- Storage Pool: Allows combining of drives, files or folders into a virtual folder that can also be shared across a network.

You can use the storage pool function on it's own or in combination with one of the two RAID options. The advantage of FlexRAID is that you can expand the array at any given time and use any sized disk. Disks do not have to match in size or speed. Another advantage is that when any of the drives fail, depending on the level of protection you setup, you can loose 1, 2 or more drives. If you setup your system with a single parity drive, you can loose one drive and recover the data that was lost on that one drive. If you loose one more drive, you will not be able to recover the data on either of the two lost drives, however the data on all your remaining drives is still accessible!!! This is the main advantage that FlexRAID has over most other implementations.

From your original post, all you are looking for is the storage pool option, so no RAID involved which means that if a drive dies, you will only loose what's on that one drive.

Best thing for you to do is to go over to the FlexRAID forum and read up on it:

http://www.openegg.org

http://www.openegg.org/forums/forums/list.page

 

[FrozenDevl]

FlexRAID gives you a few different options:

- Snapshot RAID: Manually or Scheduled parity calculation, updates parity when invoked manually or via the scheduler at predetermined times.
- Realtime RAID: Similar to a normal RAID, will update parity on the fly when data changed.
- Storage Pool: Allows combining of drives, files or folders into a virtual folder that can also be shared across a network.

You can use the storage pool function on it's own or in combination with one of the two RAID options. The advantage of FlexRAID is that you can expand the array at any given time and use any sized disk. Disks do not have to match in size or speed. Another advantage is that when any of the drives fail, depending on the level of protection you setup, you can loose 1, 2 or more drives. If you setup your system with a single parity drive, you can loose one drive and recover the data that was lost on that one drive. If you loose one more drive, you will not be able to recover the data on either of the two lost drives, however the data on all your remaining drives is still accessible!!! This is the main advantage that FlexRAID has over most other implementations.

From your original post, all you are looking for is the storage pool option, so no RAID involved which means that if a drive dies, you will only loose what's on that one drive.

Best thing for you to do is to go over to the FlexRAID forum and read up on it:

http://www.openegg.org

Perfect, thanks for that very well laid out explanation. Answered all of my questions, I'll head over to their forums for more info.