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Spanning Disks in W7 / W8 - good for Music libraries etc
Hi everyone
Rather than have a load of disks such as Vol C, D, E, F etc why not use SPANNED Disks and the Library feature in conjunction with each other.
This allows you to span volumes so that you can have music / video / other libraries which can span across up to 32 physical disks.
Provided you have 1 MB (yes ONE MB) space left at the end of the volume you can create or convert existing Disks to Dynamic Disks without losing data.
Control panel==>computer management==>administrative tools==>disk management
right mouse click on the Disk (left hand box) and chose convert to dynamic disk.
To create a spanned volume chose create spanned volume and a box will appear listing the dynamic disks -- click the disk volumes you want spanned.
Windows will now treat this is ONE disk -- assign your library etc to it.
Remember though -- YOU CAN'T INSTALL THE OS on a dynamic disk -- I have a separate SSD where I've installed windows.
Backup -- you need to re-structure your backup strategy -- backup the library rather than physical volumes.
Remember also that since you have multiple volumes which the system thinks is a single disk -- errors get more complicated to resolve -- but with excellent hardware reliability coupled with a decent backup strategy this really makes library and database management much easier.
For example you might have 2 TB of music -- it's much easier to manage this as a single music library (or disk) rather than MANUALLY spread it over 3 or 4 separate 500 GB disks.
Screenshots show a created single spanned volume from two disks -- and windows explorer now shows windows thinks it's a 1.04 TB single volume.
Using this feature with a library or a database system (MySQL for example) allows you to bunch a whole set of smaller disks into a decently sized large one without you having to worry where the data is physically located -- also provides a decent use for some of your older disks as you upgrade to bigger ones without running out of volume letters.
Only one drawback is if either of the disks fail the whole thing fails -- but with decent backup and usually very good HDD reliability this type of system makes managing large multimedia libraries and databases very worth while.
ALWAYS THOUGH HAVE RELIABLE BACKUPS WHATEVER SYSTEM YOU CHOOSE.
Hope some of you find this useful.
Cheers
jimbo
Hi everyone
Rather than have a load of disks such as Vol C, D, E, F etc why not use SPANNED Disks and the Library feature in conjunction with each other.
This allows you to span volumes so that you can have music / video / other libraries which can span across up to 32 physical disks.
Provided you have 1 MB (yes ONE MB) space left at the end of the volume you can create or convert existing Disks to Dynamic Disks without losing data.
Control panel==>computer management==>administrative tools==>disk management
right mouse click on the Disk (left hand box) and chose convert to dynamic disk.
To create a spanned volume chose create spanned volume and a box will appear listing the dynamic disks -- click the disk volumes you want spanned.
Windows will now treat this is ONE disk -- assign your library etc to it.
Remember though -- YOU CAN'T INSTALL THE OS on a dynamic disk -- I have a separate SSD where I've installed windows.
Backup -- you need to re-structure your backup strategy -- backup the library rather than physical volumes.
Remember also that since you have multiple volumes which the system thinks is a single disk -- errors get more complicated to resolve -- but with excellent hardware reliability coupled with a decent backup strategy this really makes library and database management much easier.
For example you might have 2 TB of music -- it's much easier to manage this as a single music library (or disk) rather than MANUALLY spread it over 3 or 4 separate 500 GB disks.
Screenshots show a created single spanned volume from two disks -- and windows explorer now shows windows thinks it's a 1.04 TB single volume.
Using this feature with a library or a database system (MySQL for example) allows you to bunch a whole set of smaller disks into a decently sized large one without you having to worry where the data is physically located -- also provides a decent use for some of your older disks as you upgrade to bigger ones without running out of volume letters.
Only one drawback is if either of the disks fail the whole thing fails -- but with decent backup and usually very good HDD reliability this type of system makes managing large multimedia libraries and databases very worth while.
ALWAYS THOUGH HAVE RELIABLE BACKUPS WHATEVER SYSTEM YOU CHOOSE.
Hope some of you find this useful.
Cheers
jimbo
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