How to map multiple disks mapped to a single drive letter

PARANOiA

Veteran
My system at the moment has 2x1TB disks and 1x500mb disk. I have five partitions for different functions, with my biggest being for video files taking up a whole 1TB disk, which is unfortunately full. I do have plenty of space across the disks which I'd like to use, however I'd prefer not to have to span the logical organisation of files across multiple drive letters - say, going to x:\ for movies and y:\ for TV rips.

What's I'd like to do is have something like having my Video drive letter map to multiple disks - so maybe the Movies subfolder would be mapped to the the 1tb disk, while I could have TV rips on a partition on the second disk but mapped as a subfolder on y:\. Is this possible?

So my options as I see them are:
1) get the above situation working, so the physical location of my files are invisible to me as the user
2) buy a bigger HDD (1.5 - 2TB) and keep upgrading as they fill
3) keep them across multiple disks and multiple drive letter mappings

I remember reading a bit about LVM a while back in Linux however I never found out if/how it worked in Windows.

For reference I'm on Windows 7. Any assistance/suggestions would be gratefully appreciated. Cheers.
 
AFAIK dynamic volumes can be expanded with extra partitions :

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772180.aspx

Making large volumes through this method is dangerous though ... one drive dies and you loose everything. Something like aufs2 on linux is better in that regard (you get a composite volume, which acts like a normal disc, but the underlying data is spread out over the real discs which can still be individually accessed).
 
On NTFS partitions you can mount other partitions as folders which is similar to the way *nix filesystems are mounted. Go into disk management right click on the partition and choose change drive letters and paths. Then press Add and select a folder.
 
On NTFS partitions you can mount other partitions as folders which is similar to the way *nix filesystems are mounted. Go into disk management right click on the partition and choose change drive letters and paths. Then press Add and select a folder.

Thanks - that looks like the easiest way to do what I'm attempting to do.

MfA - thanks for the advice too.

Cheers
 
Maybe make the disks into a JBOD RAID array? ...Assuming your disk subsystem hardware supports it of course. :)
 
JBOD is just a bunch of drives ... he has that already.

Yes, but it does put them all as one drive letter which is what he was after.

That said, I think the method of changing the drive letter to be a folder of another drive letter is a more elegant and manageable situation.

Regards,
SB
 
Just trying to point out that saying "JBOD RAID" doesn't make a lot of sense ... we have a perfectly good name already for software RAID (<- that one).
 
JBOD is just a bunch of drives ... it's not a RAID format.

Hardware or software JBOD? Drives accessed individually over NAS, SAN, SAS/SATA with and without port multipliers ... which of these is software JBOD, which is hardware JBOD? I'd say to tie either distinction to the term is nonsensical ... it's accessed as Just a Bunch Of Drives, the interconnect standard is not relevant to that. With RAID you have either hardware or software XOR processing, you have hardware or software retention of unwritten stripes (which is where software RAID fucks up) etc, so here the hardware/software distinction makes sense ... with JBOD, not so much.
 
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There are add-on solutions (internal or external) with JBOD support, which is where I draw the line of distinction...
 
There are add-on solutions (internal or external) with JBOD support, which is where I draw the line of distinction...

Add in Raid cards also support single disks but you don't call those Raid. MfA has a valid point that JBOD requires no Raid specific calls in order to function. It's just that, a bunch of disks mapped to a single drive letter.

WHS uses a more advanced form of JBOD, but noone in their right minds considers it a RAID array even though it supports some RAID level features.

Regards,
SB
 
Add in Raid cards also support single disks but you don't call those Raid. MfA has a valid point that JBOD requires no Raid specific calls in order to function. It's just that, a bunch of disks mapped to a single drive letter.
Well no, not really ... that's a span. JBOD is just a bunch of drives, it means nothing less than the fact that the host is accessing drives individually and nothing more. Really it's Just a Bunch Of Drives.

The term is overused and 9 times out of 10 adds no useful information ... for instance JBOD RAID, yes you are running a RAID on top of just a bunch of drives ... that is kind of inherent in the bloody term RAID already. Or external HD cages with port multiplier saying "SATA port multiplier JBOD" ... all the useful information is in the "SATA port multiplier" part ... all the useless information is in the JBOD part.
WHS uses a more advanced form of JBOD
WHS will generally run on a host with just a bunch of drives ... but it uses an union filesystem and automated duplication (and the union is what you see when you use it as NAS, so from the point of view of other hosts it's most definitely not JBOD). Again, saying JBOD adds no useful information :)

/rant
 
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