Hello all, I search on goolge and found a couple of links on this but am still a bit confused. I have two physically separate scsi drives each around 5GB. I want to make them look like one physical drive under windows xp since 5Gb is too small a volume to work with XP. From what I understand I can't use spanned volumes because it cannot contain the OS and striped volumes must be the same in size. I'm not really sure which way to tackle the problem and wondered if anyone in here could help me. I cannot use RAID since this is an old machine and they are not SATA drives.
Says who? SATA drive interface has nothing to do with RAID. RAID has been around for years...and SATA is new. Grab yourself a PCI IDE RAID card, and have fun.
I'll have to look more into RAID, thanks for the clarification. So this method will allow me to have the OS on the 'unified' drive? Thanks
Been doing a bit of reading on RAID and learned that RAID 0, although it does not provide redundancy allows one to merge multiple drives into one. Since I don't want to mirror the drive in any way due to lack of space, only 2 5G drives, it seems that anything above RAID 0 does not apply to my case and hence there's no point for me to get a RAID controller. In this sense, it is dangerous if one of my drives fail since the information is split equally into both drives. However if I could concatenate the drives together they would still apear as one drive but if one fails, the data on the other is not lost. On wikepedia, it mentions that JBOD, or "Just a Bunch of Disks" is another name for concatinaction and the equivalent of spanning disks: " JBOD is useful for OSs which do not support LVM/LSM (like MS-Windows, although Windows 2003 Server, Windows XP Pro, and Windows 2000 support software JBOD, known as spanning dynamic disks)." found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks now my question is, can I use spanning dynamic disks and have the OS installed in one of the drives? I'll look into this but if anyone knows please fill me in. Thanks EDIT: It seems that I am out of luck. I just found this in the Microsoft Management Console Help: "To change a basic disk into a dynamic disk Using the Windows interface 1. Open Computer Management (Local). 2. In the console tree, click Disk Management. 3. Right-click the basic disk you want to convert, click Convert to Dynamic Disk, and then follow the instructions on your screen. If you do not see this menu item, you might be right-clicking a volume instead of a disk, the disk might have been previously converted to a dynamic disk, or the computer is a portable computer. [bold](Dynamic disks are not supported on portable computers, removable disks, detachable disks that use Universal Serial Bus (USB) or IEEE 1394 (also called FireWire) interfaces, or on disks connected to shared SCSI buses.) In addition, you cannot convert cluster disks connected to shared SCSI or Fibre Channel buses to dynamic. The Cluster service supports basic disks only.)[/bold]" Any other ideas to make two scsi drives on the same bus become 1 virtual drive? is a hardware RAID 0 still an option?
