As it is im running several HDDs and its a bit tedious because things are spread out across all of them. For example I have music albums spread out over all the drives other then my SSD Array. Now with JBOD I know that if one disc goes, they all do. Now its just music,movies,etc, nothing that cant be replaced in case of a crash but that doesnt mean I want to risk the loss of all the data. So is there any other options to explore? I read soemthing about mounting drives as FTP shares. Would this accomplish this?
I think you have a crossed fact somewhere...if a JBOD disk dies, you loose everything on that disk; the other JBOD disks are not affected (JBOD = Just a Bunch of Disks). If you want security, you can choose between software mirroring or hardware RAID5. Personally, my system has a mix of these because I ran out of ports on my hardware RAID adapter...software mirroring is just fine; other than a slight reduction in speed, and the fact that you are essentially paying double price for every GB. I also ran into the problem of having lots of files on different drives, and Windows 7 search crashes any computer with enough files to actually need it...so I found another way. I put all my music on one drive (even FLACs don't use too much space), then I put movies everywhere else, and made a folder full of shortcuts.
If everything is lumped together as one virtual disc in JBOD, how does everything else stay in tact if one drive dies? And I was just reading up further on JBOD and I looks like the drives need to be formatted first? If thats the case I suppose JBOD isnt an option right now because I just dont know how I could manage to back up my existing data with the amount of free space I have.
Oh, you never mentioned a virtual disk...yes, this is terribly dangerous. Honestly, I know it is expensive, but I highly recommend that you get a pair of 1.5TB drives and setup a software mirror. Edit-my bad...I forgot you could even use more than 1 disk in jbod.
If you're desperate to only have one partition, do it properly and go with Hardware RAID 5 or 6 (this is expensive). If you don't want to spend a fortune, just split your content up on a per-drive basis, spilling over if you need to, for example Movies 1, Movies 2, Music/Software, Games, TV1, TV2, TV3.
