4 Drives Without RAID

[Jonza]

Hi,

 

I am looking for a way to take 4 drives and have them show as 1 drive without the data loss? (Maybe I'm being stupid here) so If I remove 1 drive the data on that drive will not show untill plugged back in. so basicly if one drive fails I only loose that data? the data on the other drives is fine.

 

Maybe something doesn't exist but never know until you ask.

 

Many Thanks

-Jonathan

[AshleyAshes]

This would be a Drive Pool.  I think there's some tools in Windows itself for that, I've never used them so someone else can answer that better,.  DriveBender and FlexRAID can do that as well but they're paid products.

[Jarsky]

In Windows you're talking about Spanned Volumes, but spanned volumes dont work that way - you cant just plug/unplug the drives at will and have your files all be intact while that drive is removed.

 

If you want each disk as its own folder in a folder somewhere such as on your desktop, then you could use MKLINK to create symbolic links

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753194(v=ws.11).aspx

 

If you want it in a dedicated storage server like this though, then you could use FlexRAID as Ashley pointed out, or there's also unRAID where you can have 1 more disk to create a spanned parity.

[AshleyAshes]

Oh wait, now I remember  It's something windows USED to do with Storage Spaces, but it was discontinued.  DriveBender was a market response tot hat.

[Jonza]

22 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

Oh wait, now I remember  It's something windows USED to do with Storage Spaces, but it was discontinued.  DriveBender was a market response tot hat.

Hi,

 

Been looking at DriveBender a little bit looks good but I cannot get definitive answer, so if I copy my library of ripped movies to a Drive Bender pool the data will spread across how ever many drives I have and If I loose 1 drive I will only loose the data on that drive rather then everything spread across all the drives?

 

Thanks

[AshleyAshes]

47 minutes ago, TehJonny said:

Hi,

 

Been looking at DriveBender a little bit looks good but I cannot get definitive answer, so if I copy my library of ripped movies to a Drive Bender pool the data will spread across how ever many drives I have and If I loose 1 drive I will only loose the data on that drive rather then everything spread across all the drives?

 

Thanks

Yes, that's exactly what it does.  It takes multiple drives and pools them into a single virtual drive.  On the file level however, each drive is still just it's own NTFS drive,  You can rip them out and access their files with any other computer.  If one dies then you only lose the files on the dead drive.  DriveBender also lets you use drives of any size and use them fully/

However you may want to look into FlexRAID.  It's more expensive but it offers parity options.  Using only one drive for parity you can have an unlimited number of storage drives, again any size, and with a parity drive you can survive up to one disc failing.  It gives you SOME protection but it's a lot easier to manage than a highly complicated RAID, ZFS/ZPool or UnRAID solution.

[Jonza]

1 hour ago, AshleyAshes said:

Yes, that's exactly what it does.  It takes multiple drives and pools them into a single virtual drive.  On the file level however, each drive is still just it's own NTFS drive,  You can rip them out and access their files with any other computer.  If one dies then you only lose the files on the dead drive.  DriveBender also lets you use drives of any size and use them fully/

However you may want to look into FlexRAID.  It's more expensive but it offers parity options.  Using only one drive for parity you can have an unlimited number of storage drives, again any size, and with a parity drive you can survive up to one disc failing.  It gives you SOME protection but it's a lot easier to manage than a highly complicated RAID, ZFS/ZPool or UnRAID solution.

Thanks for all the help, hopefully you can help a bit more, I tried Blender and it does exacly what I want expect for the fact it creates empty folders on Each drive Lets Say Moive folder will be on all 4 drives but the file is only on 1? which idk bothers me all these empty folders.

 

with FlexRaid which is nicer and doesn't create these random folders and just shows whats on each disk but will not let me remove driver letters and Pool the drives? unless theres something I am missing that allows you to add drives without having drive letters assigned to physical disks, which Blender does allow.

 

I know these are very nit picky things but really want it to be how I want it.

 

Hopefully you know of a way to sort out one or the other?

 

Thanks

[AshleyAshes]

3 minutes ago, TehJonny said:

Thanks for all the help, hopefully you can help a bit more, I tried Blender and it does exacly what I want expect for the fact it creates empty folders on Each drive Lets Say Moive folder will be on all 4 drives but the file is only on 1? which idk bothers me all these empty folders.

 

with FlexRaid which is nicer and doesn't create these random folders and just shows whats on each disk but will not let me remove driver letters and Pool the drives? unless theres something I am missing that allows you to add drives without having drive letters assigned to physical disks, which Blender does allow.

 

I know these are very nit picky things but really want it to be how I want it.

 

Hopefully you know of a way to sort out one or the other?

 

Thanks

I normally didn't touch the actual drives once they were behind the software unless I had to go in for servicing.  Like, for example, I had a drive KINDA die but I was able to pull it and copy out 90% of the data using other tools.

But yeah, DriveBender produces the entire folder structure on every drive.  And yeah, I think that FlexRAID needs every drive to have a mount.

 

Take your pick.