Is it possible to virtual or some other combination of all hard drives into one large one?

Ivan Filatov2015-04-22 10:24:20

Hard disks

Ivan Filatov, 2015-04-22 10:24:20

There was a need to save large files, without thinking about the fact that there could not be free space on the disk and that another disk had to be chosen. Splitting a large set of files and saving some to one disk, some to another is also not an option.
What you want:
- 1 SSD screw - OS (Windows, Linux, OSX, whatever) - NTFS or some other file system. We don't touch him.
- N ordinary screws (1-2 TB, WD) - virtually looks like one big disk 'E' in the system, the size is equal to the sum of all screws. At the same time, I save everything there and do not think about the fact that the file can physically be on several screws.
Is this even possible? What OS can do this? Maybe a special file system? RAID here in a subject or not?
Can what there are programs, over OS, for virtualization of file space?
I will be glad for any help!

Answer the question

In order to leave comments, you need to log in

9 answer(s)

Andrey Birulya, 2015-04-22
@NYMEZIDE

In addition to the options above, if we are talking about win8, then there is still a completely household one through the Control Panel\System and Security\Disk Spaces

Artem @Jump, 2015-04-22
curated by the

Is it possible to virtual or some other combination of all hard drives into one large one?

Yes.

RAID here in a subject or not?

Partially. that is, it can be implemented in conjunction with RAID, it is possible to implement some RAID chips without building a classic RAID.
On Linux this technology is called LVM
On Windows this technology is called Storage Spases.

athacker, 2015-04-22
@athacker

If the screws are of different sizes, then RAID will not help here, it cannot work on disks of different sizes. Just something in the spirit, as Windows calls it, "composite volume." It assembles disks one by one into one shared logical volume. This is definitely on the 2012 server, I don’t know about Win8, I haven’t tried it.
Similarly, you can do it on FreeBSD - or through the geom concat (gconcat) module, you can file any file system on it. Or a ZFS spanned volume.
I think Linux LVM should also be able to do this.
About the reliability of such a design, of course, it is not worth talking about.

bobrovskyserg, 2015-04-22
@bobrovskyserg

lvm

Ivan Arxont, 2015-04-22
@arxont

RAID0. Almost any operating system can program.

Andrew, 2015-04-22
@dredd_krd

Depends on requirements.
If you need fast access, but you can sacrifice fault tolerance, you need RAID 0 : it simultaneously writes different blocks to all disks, thereby increasing the read / write speed in proportion to the number of disks, but if one disk is covered, then all information can no longer be restored. For fault tolerance, you can think towards RAID 5 , for example.
If you just need to combine a pack of disks into one large one, and it’s quite possible to give a damn about the high write speed, for example, to store some backups, then I recommend JBOD - if one disk crashes, then the rest of the data will lie linearly and be lost only part of the files instead of the entire amount of information.
I don’t remember exactly about Windows support, but any Linux can do this type of “raid” out of the box

Gleb Bogdanov, 2015-04-22
@bogdanov_go

Especially for you - MHDDFS. This is a file system module for FUSE that allows you to combine several ordinary file systems into one large "virtual" one, which will contain not only all the files of the combined FS, but also all their free space. In addition, unlike other similar modules, this one does not limit the ability to write to a virtual unified FS, but automatically distributes new files to those physical disks where there is still free space.
The package is available for Linux distributions (works on Debian, Ubuntu for sure)

Vitaly Pukhov, 2015-04-23
@Neuroware

I myself asked myself this question, if under Linux there are a bunch of options and there are quite reliable ones, then under windows there are only a couple and then half of the paid ones, I found such an OpenSource product as liquescesolved by the fact that you need to find this folder (file) in the pool folders on the physical disk and do whatever you want with it. Even from such a disk, not all games are launched, after all, it is not an ideal "virtual" disk.

alexq2, 2016-01-07
@alexq2

How much total disk space do you need? How many disks do you want to cram into the ride?