HDD Archiving - Researching how to chain mult hdd's as one drive unit ?

[vhelp]

Ok. Here's the scoop.. more and more, I'm seeing topics regarding HDD
backup/archiving, etc. and they have inspired my thinking in moving
towards that direction -- reading on..

I have been thinking about this myself, about *multiple* HDD archiving.

I think that what is missing here is a few key elements that would help
us in this area. Let me try and explain, if I can, and you-all can see
and/or help me (us) make this possible..

A) - Say I have 4 HDD's sitting around:

** 60g
** 100g
** 40g
** 250g

B) - And, I want to use all these in one massive chain, and the system
( should ? ) look at them ( as *it*, now ) and only see, say, Drive F:
so that we have 250+40+100+60 = 450g for Drive F:

And, whenever I want to access any video files on this Drive F:, I would
do so in the manor -- following demo examples below:

** vdub("F:\movie_01.avi"
** vdub("F:\movie_02.avi"
** player("F:\movie_28.mpg")

Note, all these movies will undoubtebly be on any one of those HDD's listed
under A)

So I guess, I'm asking, (to make the above a reality) what gizmo or device or
what-have-you would allow multipole spanning/chaining/adding or what-have-you
of more than one HDD, *and* continue to add NEW hdd's ( to n ) as time move on ??

Operating systems to support:

WIN98 / SE / W2K / XP / etc.

Thanks,
-vhelp 4111

[free is better]

what you are looking for is provided by a RAID set up. It uses drives of equal capacities configured to be seen as one logical drive. you can go online and find an abundance of information regarding RAID and how to set it up. currently more motherboard manufacturers are moving toward providing this option.

[rallynavvie]

Actually it's just volume spanning. Win2k and later can do it using NTFS formatting and assigning the partition as a dynamic disk. You can then span that volume further by adding more disks. Unfortunately your drives need to already be formatted NTFS and be dynamic disks before the data was written to them. Partition Magic may be able to re-assign their identity without reformatting but I don't have a copy on this machine.

However I haven't seen the information on what happens to the spanned volume when one disk fails. That is I don't know if data is stored across the spanned volumes similar to a RAID stripe (but accessed consecutively rather than concurrently) or if it limits to writing a file to a single disk, multiple files to multiple disks. For instance if you had a spanned volume totalling 160GB made up of four 40GB disks, each with only 2GB of free space left, you wouldn't be able to save a 6GB file to the volume because it would need to span several disks. I'm sure there's a Windows support file on this somewhere.

[vhelp]

Thanks for the info so far, guys.

Actually, what I'm researching about, are for *external encloser* type
setups, where you have maybe a main cabenet or origianl box, and it has
a ribbon cable *capable* of being expanded w/ add'l (raw) HDD units,
much like you (supposivly) can with USB devices. I think, if memory
serves me, (I don't pay much attention to these things, these days) it
can daisy chain something like 127 devices ??

Well, anyway, please keep the ideas comming. Again, thanks.

-vhelp 4112

[jsmithepa]

Guy, HD are so cheap nowadays, it maybe CHEAPER to dump those 40/60G and buy a 350 gig for $99.

RAID wants identical drives, so that wouldn't work in this situation.

[vhelp]

Yes, but the problem here is this..

I want something that is *variable*, letting me put in whatever I have
available or capable of purchasing at the time of need (for upgrade of today,
for instance) A month later, my needs may dicktate something withing my buduget
and comprimise, and the size/price will reflect that upgrade. Thus..

Today - ADD: 60g hdd -- due to buget avail and need for space/project.
Dec - ADD: 80g hdd -- due to buget avail and need for space/project.
Feb - ADD: 120g hdd -- due to buget avail and need for space/project.
Aug - ADD: 60g hdd -- due to buget avail and need for space/project.

This (above) is a key element in building an archival chain of HDD's.
And, add to that, changing or swapping HDD's from the above scenerios
is another option/feature, when say, a HDD fails and needs to be replace
with another HDD (even if it means borrowing from a friend, temporarily)
for instance.

Having a specific size requirement (due to aplication/electronics restrictions)
would remove the above (listed scenarios) capability. Its not that
important in considering the prices of HDD's today. That is, just because
HDD prices are dropping doesn't mean I should start building a specific
size system, not to mention how my budget will obviosly deffer from others.

-vhelp 4113

[rallynavvie]

I think you'll want to invest in something like I did for my fileserver. I invested in a bay adapter for a regular ATX case that turns two 5.25" bays into 5 hot-swappable SATA HDD bays. I had a hot-swappable single bay adapter for PATA HDDs already in there for legacy support. I did this to make it rack-mountable in a 4U case. You could get one of those FireWire (and I do recommend the FireWire version over a USB one) enclosures with 4 or more drive bays in it. Then go get yourself some hot-swappable bays for the type of HDDs you are going to use with it. Make sure to buy a model where you can get insert trays for new drives you add. I use IcyDock equipment for mine and buy more inserts than I need. Now with that single FireWire cable you can swap in and out drives on that enclosure as you need. The initial investment in the multi-bay enclosure is greater, but in the long run is cheaper and easier than having to get multiple single drive enclosures and adding them to your "chain". Granted you are limited to the max number of slots on your enclosure, but 4 seems plenty at once, or go with the 8-bay model for even more access.

The next step beyond this is a storage array which will be a much greater investment but can handle 24 or more drives.

[redwudz]

You can do some of what you want with a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Drives) RAID setup. http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/jbod.htm

The main problem with this is if one drive fails, you may lose everything, the same as RAID 0. There is a way around this if you used a backup program to backup to one larger drive. But I don't see any advantage to that sort of setup. Other RAID levels have redundancy, but at the cost of less total drive space.

An easier method may be to change over to a full tower ATX case and use mobile racks for the individual hard drives and just leave them separate. You may need to add a inexpensive PCI ATA controller, but it would allow changing out the hard drives or switching them around as long as you power down first. The racks are inexpensive: http://www.computergate.com/products/category.cfm?prodseq=J5 I have six ATA drives on one of my computers, with two of them in mobile racks.

There are ways to do this with external drive boxes, but the cost of those could be close to the cost of new, larger drives.

[edDV]

I think you'll want to invest in something like I did for my fileserver. I invested in a bay adapter for a regular ATX case that turns two 5.25" bays into 5 hot-swappable SATA HDD bays. I had a hot-swappable single bay adapter for PATA HDDs already in there for legacy support. I did this to make it rack-mountable in a 4U case. You could get one of those FireWire (and I do recommend the FireWire version over a USB one) enclosures with 4 or more drive bays in it. Then go get yourself some hot-swappable bays for the type of HDDs you are going to use with it. Make sure to buy a model where you can get insert trays for new drives you add. I use IcyDock equipment for mine and buy more inserts than I need. Now with that single FireWire cable you can swap in and out drives on that enclosure as you need. The initial investment in the multi-bay enclosure is greater, but in the long run is cheaper and easier than having to get multiple single drive enclosures and adding them to your "chain". Granted you are limited to the max number of slots on your enclosure, but 4 seems plenty at once, or go with the 8-bay model for even more access.

The next step beyond this is a storage array which will be a much greater investment but can handle 24 or more drives.

I have a kludge setup that seems to work for me. It's an old PIII tower that had nearly ten slots if you use adapters in the 5 3/4 bays. I added a Promise PCI EIDE port card that expanded ATA 66 ports to 4 (eight drives). I turned the drives backwards in the bay so that the connectors faced the outside. Then I added enough Y power splitters to give power to each drive. I don't need all these drives operational on every boot so I use the externally accessable power connector to enable the drives that I want on. A power switch could easily be built.

The top bay is for loading external bare drives as needed and has the ATA and power connector only. I keep an Excel record of what is on the drives organized by category so I know in advance which drives to power up. A reboot is necessary to reconfigure. All small early drives and critical data have been backed up to optical media. I consider this stuff expendable but I would never risk a RAID. It doesn't look like one drive but I have no problem with multiple drive letters.

This machine can be booted either in Linux or Win98se. When in Linux, a SAMBA server makes the drives available to Windows machines on the network.