Disk Spanning

Disk spanning allows multiple physical drives to function like one big drive. Spanning overcomes lack of disk space and simplifies storage management by combining existing resources or adding relatively inexpensive resources. For example, four 20 GB drives can be combined to appear to the operating system as a single 80 GB drive.

Spanning alone does not provide reliability or performance enhancements. Spanned logical drives must have the same stripe size and must be contiguous. In the following graphic, RAID 1 array is turned into a RAID 10 array.

F i g u r e 2 - 3 . E x a m pl e o f D i s k S p an n i n g

60 GByte

60 GByte

Can Be Accessed as

One 120 GByte Drive

60 GByte

60 GByte

Can Be Accessed as

One 120 GByte Drive

Introduction to RAID

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Image 37
Dell manual Disk Spanning, G u r e 2 3 . E x a m pl e o f D i s k S p an n i n g