Add up multiple disks into single storage, replace disk without destroying data

Question

Suppose I have a 1TB disk and a 2TB disk. If I want to use it as a single 3TB disk, there seems to be two solutions on Windows 8.

1. Dynamic Disk in Disk Management
2. Storage Spaces, Simple layout

But I also want I will be able to replace the physical disks as needed without losing the data. This is not logically impossible, if software supports it. For example, if I want to replace the 1TB disk with a new 3TB disk to create a single 5TB virtual disk, it could be achieved like this:

• I attach the new 3TB disk.
• I tell the software that I want to replace the 1TB disk with the new 3TB disk.
• The software copies all the data on the 1TB disk to the new 3TB disk.
• The software updates its configuration to use the 2TB disk and the 3TB disk only.
• I remove the 1TB disk.

But none of the two solutions in Windows 8 seemed to work this way. There seemed to be no way to replace a disk without destroying the virtual disk completely.

Is there any solution for this? I do not limit the solution to be a virtual hard disk. Any form of storage that Windows applications can generally read from/write to is good, such as a virtual network-mapped drive. I am not going to do advanced things like installing an OS on it. I just want to store a bunch of files in one location.

If it is not possible in Windows, is it possible in Linux?

Answer 1

With your specific example you could install the 3TB disk, copy the entirety of the other 2 disks. Then remove the 1TB and just join the 2TB to an new spanned volume created off of the new 3TB. other than that I don't know of any controller or software that will do what you're asking.

Answer 2

Since posting this question, I did quite a lot of research and testing. I could not find any solution for Windows, and Linux did not have that kind of feature by itself. The only thing I found was a file system called ZFS. But unfortunately, ZFS seemed to be a file system for Solaris, an OS I had never used before.

It seemed there was a way to install ZFS on Ubuntu, but using it without a GUI was really tedious for a lazy person like me. And I am not that familiar with Linux in the first place. So I decided to give Solaris a try.

Solaris is a very expensive server OS, but there are some free versions of it. OpenSolaris was discontinued by Oracle, and OmniOS seemed to lack GUI, so I installed OpenIndiana on a virtual machine. OpenIndina's UI was quite similar to a Linux. OpenIndiana supported ZFS out-of-the-box, but seemed to lack any GUI for it.

Again, I am really lazy. So, I searched for a GUI and found a thing called Napp It.There is a free version and a paid pro version. Since I do not need advanced features, I installed the free version. Install was really easy because it only required one command (at first I did not knew that I have to run that command as root, so it did not work and I spent several minutes to figure it out). After installing it, I just opened my web browser and connected to the administrator page.

After that, everything was intuitive. I created a pool with two virtual disks (8GB, 9GB) ease. I created a file system that uses the entire pool space (basically the same as raid0) with ease, and a Windows SMB share for it was automatically created. No headaches and lots of command line typings. At first I could not login and then I found that I have to change the root password once more (I am not sure why) in the manual. Now I could log in and read/write files.

Oh, and finally I tried replacing a disk. I replaced the existing 8GB disk with a new virtual 10GB disk. It was really easy with the GUI. I removed and formatted the 8GB disk (to be sure), and then I checked the file system. The files on the file system were all there. So far, it has the exact features I wanted, other than it is a different OS than Windows.

Then I also tried FreeNAS which also uses ZFS. Creating a pool/volume and replacing a disk was not as simple as Napp It, but it also worked. This is also not a Windows solution but a solution based on an OS called FreeBSD.

I am not going to delete my question or mark this as the answer, because there still could be a Windows solution, but I just wanted to help the people with the same requirements by sharing my experience.