Software program to manage spanned volume

[marylin171]

Hi everyone.

I am thinking of spanning together the storage hard disks in my PC into a single volume but I am wondering if there is any good software programs that can manage a spanned set of HDD’s in case one of the drives develops a fault.

Inside my desktop PC I have an SSD boot drive that I don’t intend to include in the span. Then I have two further hard disks used for storage (I may also add more later).

I run two synchronised data sets on two different devices, my main desktop PC running Windows 10 and my Synology NAS. I use them as backups of each other. The hard disks in my NAS are already combined into a single volume by the Synology DSM 6.2 system software.

I want to also have a single volume for the storage drives in my desktop to make it simpler to synchronise my desktop and my NAS.

In case one of the storage hard disks in the spanned set within my PC develops a fault I’d like to find a way to be able to replace the faulty drive without losing the entire volume.

 

[marylin171]

I think I may have answered my own question although I haven't tried it yet.

I've found that there is a little known feature of Windows called 'Storage Spaces' that looks like it's been around since Win7 which pretty much does the same job but with a few added frills.

As well as being able to combine available space from more than one hard drive to create a single volume known as a Storage Pool, you can also both add and remove drives without losing the entire volume and its data. If one hard disk shows signs of starting to fail, Storage Spaces provides a way of removing that drive from the pool. You can use the utility to prepare a drive for removal and it will copy all the data from the affected drive to available space elsewhere in the pool and then the drive can be safely removed. When you fit a replacement hard disk it can just be added to the storage pool in the normal way.

I currently have 27 TB of formatted disk space, shared between by PC and my NAS, to store and back up around 7 TB of data so as well as having a fully synchronised copy of everything on two seperate devices, it also gives me plenty of spare capacity to move date around in the event that any drive begins to fail.

As I am only a home PC user and not a professional IT geek this method makes things very straightforward and simplifies my setup so I don't have to get into overly technical things that are beyond me.