Spanned volume

A spanned volume is a formatted partition in which data is stored on more than one hard disk drive or solid-state drive, yet appears as a single volume.

A spanned volume is a non-RAID drive architecture, and may be implemented in hardware or software; It may be referred to as Concatenation, SPAN, BIG, or JBOD, though JBOD is ambiguous because it may also refer to each physical disk being presented as a separate logical volume.

Unlike RAID, spanned volumes have no fault tolerance, so if any disk fails, the data on the whole volume could be lost.

In Windows NT, a spanned volume is called a volume set. FAT16/32 and NTFS file systems may be used, and the volume can span up to 32 hard disks, and the system or boot partitions cannot be included in a spanned volume.

See also


This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Thursday, December 10, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.