XP Pro disk spanning

[Stripe]

Question for everyone.

XP Pro has the ability to span/strip disks. Although I know how to do this, all the documentation states that there is a greater chance of data loss.

Anyone know chances? Probability? And, of course, the proverbial, why?

Thanks,
Stripe

[Big Booger]

Good question,
I don't know the answer to this, but I am looking forward to the answer from whoever does.

[Stripe]

Ah ha! Found it. Here is it is:

Weigh the risks carefully before creating a volume that contains space from two or more dynamic disks. If a catastrophic failure occurs on either physical disk, the entire spanned or striped volume and all its data will be lost. Also, you cannot reverse your decision and remove one chunk of space from the extended, spanned, or striped volume. Deleting one part of the volume deletes the entire volume.

-Windows XP Inside Out

Very interesting....I'm thinking of spanning disks for a server, but the server is storing a ton of data. Now I need to decide if I want to do this....

[Big Booger]

What are the gains from doing this? It seems to be too risky for my tastes.. seeing as I have 4 HDDs.. one goes bad.. they all go??

[zipp51]

Sounds useless,unless I'm missing something here.You can take 4 HDD's and with a Raid mobo create a Raid 0+1 array which gives you twice the data rate and will mirror the first 2 drives so if one goes you have not lost anything.Sounds like the space created from the two disks may perform or cache quicker but no protection is there.

[Stripe]

I was thinking of spanning the disks to make a 120gb behave like a 240gb. Its on a file server so I didnt want to have to setup multiple drives.

I agree with everyone. Seems to risky...lose 120 and you end up losing 240.

Reason to do this...if you board does not support RAID....and you don't feel like messing with a Promise card....