Maximum PC

Hi all,

I have 3 TB of data, I want to store them on two 2TB hard drives. I don't want to split the data into 2 hard drives; I want everything saved as if all the data have been stored on a single 4TB hard drive. What are my options?

Thanks in advance!

raid 0, will make them into a single drive for all intents and purposes, but if either drive fails you lose everything, any other raid solution will require 3 or more drives, or you will not get all the capacity from the two drives. example, raid 1 mirrors, writing the same data to both drives but you would only get 2TB of total storage.

if your data is already on those two drives, making a raid would delete all the data on the drives, you would need a backup.

RAID 0 or JBOD is your only option if you want the 2TB drives to look like 4TB. I wouldn't do RAID 0 for integrity reasons.

Which OS are you talking about?

I'm believing there's a lot more involved then just setting up a RAID or JBOD because of actually creating a partition size big enough. I suppose you can always go this route

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr ... 31274.aspx

Assuming this file isn't going to change, then maybe a compressed volume would do this, but you'd also lose some performance for obvious reasons.

I am really confused right now. So many options. Of course, data reliability is important, so definitely no RAID 0. But here's what I really need. Due to financial circumstances, I won't be having a fixed PC for some time. Instead, I'll be using PCs on a temporary basis, so flexibility is very important. Because these data hard drives will be connected to different computers with different motherboards (different BIOS) and probably different operating systems (different Windows [32 bit or 64 bit]).* Also, expandability is important to me, as I will access and alter data as I use them (organize, delete redundant files, add new files, etc). If I add more enough stuff, I will have to add new drives (a third, a fourth and so forth).


* I read somewhere that there are certain disk arrangements that does not support this. For example: If, you mount the drives with DiskManagement so that they all fall under one letter, it is said that if you take these mounted hard drives out and put into another computer, it will not work and you might even lose all the data?!


BTW, what's JBOD? Is it flexible and expandable?

Short for "Just a Bunch Of Drives". A generic term for spanning drives, which takes any number of drives and the OS just adds up their space and makes it look like one drive. I don't know much else about this and I don't know what it would take to use it. Windows may have native generic driver support for spanning drives, but double check on this.

Will any of these processes erase the data? Because setting up RAID 0 or JBOD probably erases all the data in the hard drives first?

yes to set up any of these you would lose original data, you can add a disk to a jbod anytime without data loss.