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I recently created a spanned volume using two hard disks a 450 gb and a 700 gb, creating a single 1.1 Terabyte volume visible as a drive in windows.
In the past I’ve been very wary of spanned disks due to comments I’ve read in various forums.
Spanned volumes can join multiple disks together so they appear as a single drive in windows.
Please note that the disks used for spanned volumes have to be empty and converted to dynamic disks and NO other operating system uses dynamic disks, so getting them to work in other OS’s will require a work around if its possible at all. (it can be done in Linux)
Though it must be said if one disk in the spanned volume dies the whole spanned volume dies, and any remaining disks not are not accessible though the file system.
However if a disk or disks are temporary missing for some reason, the volume will reappear in windows as soon as as all disks in the volume are working again.
With spanned volumes the data is written the first disk in the volume until its full and then the next and so on.
This means you can recover data left on disks from a failed spanned volume.
I tested this by breaking a spanned volume and seeing if I could recover any data, from the individual disks even though they where not accessible by the windows file system.
I tried several data recovery programs, Getdataback worked the best, recovering all 450 gb of data. that I used to test the spanned volume.
Though it took a day to recover all the the data. using a mid range pc (core 2 duo e6600), using the on-board disk controller.
All in all in my opinion there’s no reason not to use spanned volumes as long you have good data recovery software and the time to use it.
Though personally I think creating a spanned volume of more than a couple Terabytes, is not a good idea.
Unless you have a full backup, or don’t mind waiting days to recover data
Performance wise I found no drawbacks using a spanned volume.
I tried file transfers on each disk formatted as individual primary partitions and then as one spanned volume and there was no difference in file transfer speed.