Two separate RAID sets stacked up logically under one drive letter 1

[BigFunkyChief]

Here's my situation on my Dell PowerVault 220 SCSI Storage Unit.

We currently have two 300GB SCSI320 drives (RAID 1) for our Graphics files. Typical files are around 200MB (30x42" posters, etc), and can get much larger very easily.

We also have five 74GB SCSI320 drives (RAID 5) for our architecture files. Lots of read/writes, but file sizes are very small, 5MB and under.

I chose the above config because the large files were significantly slower on the RAID5 setup than the RAID1. The small architecture files had fast access on either setup, so I chose the RAID5 for them for better redundancy.

Now we'd like to combine these files (logically) into one folder.

So we'll have a folder for the project, then under it a folder for Graphics and a folder for Architecture.

Obviously combining the files onto one physical disk would accomplish this, but performance will suffer tremendously.

How can I have two separate RAID sets stacked up logically under one drive letter? I can't see how it's possible, but I'm sure it is in some way.

Thanks in advance!!

"Rule #1 - When stumped, check your Event Logs!

 

[johnv20]

One way you could consider is to setup a DFS which will place both drives in the same place for all users

for more details the url below has a good introduction

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Windows2003-Distributed-File-System.html

Also I suspect that the reason your raid 5 is running slow is that the block size on the raid may be too small.
You also need to ensure that the raid is set to write-back caching, the other option "write-through" will result in the data being written the hard drive cache which will be much slower

 

[BigFunkyChief]

Thanks for the tips. I setup a test server and checked out DFS. It looks cool, but I don't think it'll work for what I need to do. Here's a tree of how I would like things setup:

M:\Project Folders
\Client 1
\Drawings <-lives on one disk
\Graphics <-lives on another disk
\Client 2
\Drawings <-lives on one disk
\Graphics <-lives on another disk
etc....

Our guys want all our stuff logically under one tree, but I'd like the graphics and drawings to be on different disks....thanks for the help on this, it seems kind of tricky to me.

"Rule #1 - When stumped, check your Event Logs!

 

[BigFunkyChief]

I think I've found the answer (with help here of course).

DFS will work for what I'm trying to do...but I'll need to move to Windows 2003 SBS R2 in order to do this. 2003 Server SP1's version of DFS does not allow me to create new empty folders (with no targets), while R2 will.

And thanks for the tips on the RAID 5...I will try those.

Thanks for the help!

"Rule #1 - When stumped, check your Event Logs!