I used the Nvidia raid utility to turn two hard drives into one 'spanning JBOD'. On windows, it just looks like one hard drive (it's the one windows is installed onto). Is it possible for me to break down the array without losing data?
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BTW, 'Spanning JBOD' is a bad name for this technology, as it is not JBOD at all. BIG and SPAN are common names for this technology. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-RAID_drive_architectures– Frank ThomasCommented May 30, 2013 at 16:55
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I know. Its what NVIDIA calls it– AmjaCommented May 30, 2013 at 17:06
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2 Answers
No. The concatenation exists at a block level rather than a file level, which means that not just a few files, but the entire filesystem, is spanned across the pair of drives.
After breaking the array, you may possibly be able to mount the first drive with a valid but degraded NTFS filesystem. You almost certainly will not be able to mount the second one; at best, you'd need to use a tool like NTFS Undelete to analyze the bag of bytes remaining on the platters and see what files can be identified for retrieval.
You cannot directly breakup spanned drives without losing all the data.
Your only option to "break" the array without losing data would be to clone the spanned volume to a different, single drive then break up the array. Once your array is broken up, you can format the disks into separate volumes again. Now re-clone the backup disk to one of the previous spanned disks(assuming its large enough).
Or you can just clone to a single disk, break the array and be done with it.
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There are tons of apps that can clone disks for you. This article gives a good rundown of the most popular ones. lifehacker.com/5839753/the-best-disk-cloning-app-for-windows Commented May 30, 2013 at 17:34