Hello,
I’m setting up a NAS device (Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 x64) to use as a file server.
The machine has 5 750gb drives setup in a Raid5 configuration. Because of the 2tb limit when using MBR formatted drives I had to create two virtual drives: one of 1tb in size and the other was 1.8tb in size. Obviously these show up as separate drives within Windows.
What I really want is for all this space to appear as one drive. I know one is option would be to convert both drives to GPT drives but for internal reasons I cant do that. So, what I was thinking was that I could convert both from Basic to Dynamic disks and then create a Spanned partition across both. This would seem to solve my problem.
My concern, however, is that this setup (with the spanned partition) would somehow come back to bite me if/when one of the physical disks failed.
One part of me feels that since the underlying setup of the disks is Raid5 that if one disk fails it will keep running like it’s supposed to and I can replace the failed disk.
The other part of me wonders if a disk fails if somehow this will corrupt the spanned partition so that all the data on it has to be restored.
Anyone doing anything like this? Any problems? Am I going about this the wrong way?
Any help/suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks.
RobinH
