RAID Substitute?

[Boozer]

Is there a way with XP I can access multiple hard drives as one drive without using RAID? My understanding is the RAID 0 will stripe across all drives and failure of any singal drive results in a loss of all data, on all drives. I dont want to use any other level of RAID because I have no spare hard drive space to use for redundancy. If one disk fails, and I lose the data on that disk, thats okay, I just can't loose all data across all disks.

So is there something that will allow multiple drives to be accessed as just one drive, but will write data across each disk sequentially, so when disk 1 fills up, it then starts writing to disk 2, etc.?

 

[Bachinat0r]

i believe that you can do what you are talking about under disk management. if you set your second drive up as a logical drive and make it a logical drive to the 1st basic drive. basically it sets it all up as one solid drive without the raid function present. so if one drive goes down, the information on the other drive would still be present.

 

[Boozer]

Thanks for the reply, but after some messing around, I found I could change my disks to dynamic disks, and then span them using WinXP, however Microsoft states on :

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...rprise/proddocs/en-us/sag_DISKconcepts_15.asp

that "Spanned volumes cannot be mirrored and do not offer fault tolerance. If one of the disks containing a spanned volume fails, the entire volume fails and all the data on it is lost."

So it appears that a spanned volume is the same as RAID 0 with no speed increase. I found a program called DriveSpan that does what I want, but I would like to find a way to do it that doesnt cost me $70.00 Let me know of any other ideas.