Do you use Drive Pooling Setups?, [TOS #6: moved from General Audio] Options

[Marc27]

Basically a drive pooling array allows to combine multiple hard drives to appear as one logical drive within the operating system "which allows for a simpler data management hierarchy and increased data transfer speeds".

Setups I'm aware of:

1. Create Snapped Volumes by using Windows built-in Dynamic Disks.
   Cons: If One hard drive fails the whole volume is lost (same as weith a RAID 0 array).
2. Setup a RAID
   IIRC there are up to 10 types of RAID arrays? Depending on the type used, there will be a different level of data redundancy.
   Example in RAID-0, if one of hard drives fails the complete volume is lost as well.
3. Drive Extender feature in Windows Home Server v12, which IIRC was removed in v2.
4. Use a third party a software such as Drive Blender, StabbleBit Drive or Liquesce, the latter appears to be in an early stage of development (Beta?).

So the question is whether you use any of the setups listed or another alternative array, and what has been your experience, what would you recommend.

[Marc27]

If I had set the title to something like "Do you use Drive Pooling Setups for Storing/Managing your Audio/ Audio Library" would be still Off-topic?

[slks]

I am currently using the RAID-0-like feature in Windows 7 (I think they call it a striped or spanned dynamic volume IIRC).

This is using 2 older, slower 160 GB IDE drives. Having them in RAID-0 gives almost identical performance to my newer SATA disks. Unfortunately I didn't do any benchmarks on the drives beforehand, so I can't say how it compares before & after striping the drives. I did it mostly to make managing my files easier. I have 4 physical disks in my computer. If I can put 2 of them together it makes it that much easier.

However, you essentially double your chance of losing data due to a hardware failure, since if either of the disks fails, your data is ruined.

I actually wouldn't recommend RAID-0 or similar arrays unless you have applications that are very sensitive to disk speed with data that can be easily re-created (like videogames). But these days, if you're looking at speed as your top priority, you may as well upgrade straight to an SSD instead of messing around with RAID-0.