Consolidating Numerous Hard Drives?

Question

I have had past experience with Windows Home Server and one of the main features is how it consolidates all the drives together into one large virtual drive. I have Windows Server 2003 and I would like to know if I can do this with WS 2003. Also what is the real name for this feature?

Thanks In Advance =]

Answer 1

Server 2003 doesn't do the same thing (in fact, doing that in WHS has a bug that could corrupt your data - an update is now (or will be shortly) available to prevent that, but it was a problem.

Server 2003 can utilize dynamic discs which can "combine" multiple disks into one using disk spanning.  However, any tech with experience will tell you NOT TO DO THIS.  This is because should one disk in the spanned set fail, you'll lose easy access to ALL your data and possibly require an expensive data recovery service.  It's also POSSIBLE that the data will be PERMANENTLY lost.  Further, dynamic disks cannot be managed or resized by disk management tools like partition magic or acronis disk director.

You can get a hardware RAID controller and create a RAID 5 array which joins 3 or more disks into one with 2 times the smallest disk space available.  Meaning if you have two 300 GB drives and one 200 GB drive, you can "join" them together in a RAID 5 that will be 2 (drives) times the smallest drive size (200 GB) for a total of 400 GB of available storage.  

For more information, google "RAID 5"