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    what does drive spanning in Vista do?

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by hehe299792458, Aug 7, 2008.

  1. hehe299792458

    hehe299792458 Notebook Deity

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    I have three HDDs of varing sizes and I want to get rid of all the drive letters. My mobo supports JBOD. Should I use that or the Windows "spanning discs" function? I know for JBOD that if one disc fails, I only lose the data on that disc (as opposed to loosing all my data on RAID0 arrays). Does "spanning discs" function in the same way - not destroying all my data when a single drive fails?
     
    hehe299792458, Aug 7, 2008
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  2. fonduekid

    fonduekid JSUTAONHTERBIRCKINTEHWLAL

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    AFAIK, spanning is a process for dividing / spreading out large volume of data across several storage medium.... and multi drive data spanning is a feature to enable users span the backed up data onto more than one drive... this includes hard disks, shared network locations and so on..

    Though I don't know for sure which one is better among the choices you have listed!!
     
    fonduekid, Aug 7, 2008
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  3. Icewalker

    Icewalker Notebook Consultant

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    You're right about JBOD, and you should use that if your hardware supports it.

    To answer your other question: Vista's disc spanning is a software-level feature, it just logically concatenates/merges two or more hard discs so they appear as one (huge) drive. Yes, those discs will appear under one drive letter in Explorer and other programs.

    But -- again, you're right -- if either of those "spanned" discs fails, all data will probably be lost. It's no RAID or JBOD.

    The only good use of Vista's "disc spanning" I see is to work around hard drive size limitations in Vista, that could be a problem for some people.

    Hope this helps.

    PS: More info on Vista's disc spanning here:
    http://technologynews.ws/597/disk-spanning-unique-feature-in-vista/
     
    Icewalker, Aug 7, 2008
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  4. Icewalker

    Icewalker Notebook Consultant

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    You're absolutely right:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_spanning

    This term is usually applied to backup software or optical disc burning.

    But Microsoft don't care, so they called Vista's logical drive spanning "disc spanning" to create more confusion ;)

    From the context it was clear what hehe299792458 meant, though.
     
    Icewalker, Aug 7, 2008
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  5. hehe299792458

    hehe299792458 Notebook Deity

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    So Vista's "disc spanning" feature is not a software version of JBOD?
     
    hehe299792458, Aug 8, 2008
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  6. Icewalker

    Icewalker Notebook Consultant

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    Sorry, I confused JBOD and RAID in my original reply, so when I recommended JBOD I meant RAID.

    Both JBOD and Vista's "disc spanning" just concatenate/merge several disc into a logical entity, so those will appear as one logical drive. No data redundancy/failure tolerance is provided.

    Yes it appears it is. Sorry for the confusion.

    Hope this is clear now.
     
    Icewalker, Aug 8, 2008
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