RE: Adding drives to my Media Server

["Paul Gordon" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Simon.

There are plenty of ways to achieve this, - both in hardware and
software... the question really is which is the *best* method for you,
given what hardware you've got to play with...

Given that both your disks are SATA, - are you running them off motherboard
SATA ports, or an add-in SATA controller card? - whichever it is, does it
offer any kind of RAID option? - It's unlikely to offer RAID5, (and you
couldn't do RAID5 with only 2 drives anyway), but most modern boards offer
at least RAID0/1 or JBOD modes which would do what you want...

If the hardware route doesn't float your boat, then there are a couple
options in software, which vary slightly depending on which version of
Windows XP you have. The simplest would probably be to split the 80GB drive
into two partitions, - say a 10GB for the OS & program files etc... and
a 70GB one for additional data storage... when you format the 70GB one,
don't assign it a drive letter, instead assign it a mount point at an empty
folder somewhere on your 250GB drive, then the 70GB chunk of that drive
will appear as a folder on the 250GB drive... Alternatively, you could just
make the two partitions into a spanned volume which achieves a similar
result, but presents it all as a single larger volume.

these aren't the only ways to skin this particular cat, but are probably
the two easiest to configure...

However, none of these options provides any redundancy, so I would caution
you to think about backup.... the more storage you grow to, the more you
have to lose! - how about just using the 80GB drive to backup onto... - no
need to backup freeview recordings I would imagine, so that cuts down your
"important" data volume to a level that would easily be
acommodated on an 80GB disk. There are of course plenty of ways to
configure this as well...

Paul G.



________________________________

From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx on behalf of Simon Ryley
Sent: Thu 19/01/2006 13:08
To: UKHA_D Group
Subject: [ukha_d] Adding drives to my Media Server



The time has come when the little 80Gb hard disc in my media server
isn't big enough to store all the pictures, mp3s and freeview recordings
we now have.  So I'm looking to upgrade..

Current spec is a Spinpoint SATA 80Gb, holding windows xp, a few gig of
photos, 10g of mp3s and the rest as freeview recordings.

For performance reasons, I'd like to put the recordings on a separate
drive, probably a 250Gb Spinpoint SATA.  This leaves me with an 80Gb
drive that will be barely used.  Is there any way in windows or
otherwise to combine the two drives to one big virtual drive, giving me
about 60Gb of extra recording space, and hopefully improving the data
throughput as I am using both Sata channels in parallel?  The
motherboard does support Raid, but I've not been down that route before.

Is this a sensible option, and if not, does anyone have a small
Spinpoint sata drive they no longer want?

Cheers,

Simon