Spanning Windows volume over one or more hard drives

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The_Unbeliever

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With Novell Netware 3.12 it was possible to add another hard drive to the system, and then span the current volume onto that hard drive.

Meaning that, for example you started off with an 250Mb HDD, then when it gets full, you add another 250Mb and span the current volume onto that HDD so you've got a 500Mb volume (spanning two hard disks).

Is this sort of thing also possible with Windows Server 2003?

Regards

Libs
 
No.

Not RAID. (Not all of us is lucky to have a RAID setup preconfigured, or the right RAID hardware).

Let me clarify.

You got 4 SATA ports (or 2 IDE connectors) on your motherboard.

Now you got a 350Gb HDD with CD-Rom (taking up two SATA ports (SATA-0 and SATA-1), or 1 IDE connector).

The HDD is partitioned in two, a C: drive (100Gb for Windows) and a D: drive (250Gb for data).

Now the data expands to fill the hard drive (as data does) and you need to add extra storage space.

So you drop in another, extra HDD (say 500Gb) on either SATA-2 or as a master on the second IDE channel.

What do you do in Windows to expand the D: partition onto the new HDD? Remember, you don't want to create extra drive letters, you want to enlarge the partition.
 
In Linux you can use LVM - I googled that along with windows and found this:

Dynamic volume is Microsoft proprietary format developed together with Veritas (now acquired by Symantec)[4][5]. Basic volumes and dynamic volumes differ in ability to extend storage beyond one physical disk. The basic partitions are confined to one disk and their size is fixed. Dynamic volumes allow to adjust size and to add more free space either from the same disk or another physical disk. Dynamic volumes using space on different physical disks are called spanned volumes. Presently spanned volume can use a maximum of 32 physical disks.
Click to expand...
 
RAID. It's called 'striping' in Windows, essential it's a RAID0 array. Easy to do as long as you don't boot off it, and once any one of the drives in the span fails, you will loose all your data - there is zero redundancy on it.

In your drive/storage manager (right click my computer, manage), convert the drives to dynamic drives, click the drive you want to extend, select the appropriate drive you want to expand, and add black / clean storage space that is available from other drives....
 
savage said:
RAID. It's called 'striping' in Windows, essential it's a RAID0 array. Easy to do as long as you don't boot off it, and once any one of the drives in the span fails, you will loose all your data - there is zero redundancy on it.
Click to expand...

big whoop for those who does it on a mission-critical server and all the data is toast because of the failure of a single HDD :D :D

At least the PC I want to do this on is used for backup purposes - the data is mirrored to this specific PC. So if a HDD fails and brings down the spanned array, I'm not worried as we can get another hard drive and re-mirror the data from the master file server.

Of course, for a proper server I will recommend having a proper RAID array with a hot spare.
 
Reading through the MS KB article was interesting, I didn't know you could extend volumes using basic disks. I always thought it was for dynamic disks only. Hmm, interesting.
 
Another thing : if you really want to span a RAID, it can be done - but you need to span it across another RAID just to be on the safe side.

Especially when it's a mission-critical server...
 
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