it were a single physical drive. This virtualization allows you to overcome restrictions that are
imposed by physical hard drives, such as speed, storage capacity or data storage reliability.
BIG
The BIG storage policy concatenates a series of physical hard drives as a single large volume;
resulting in a seamless expansion of virtual
volumes
beyond the physical limitations of singularly
connected hard drives. CoolMax CD-320 BIG storage policy delivers maximum storage space
without a single large capacity and costly hard drive.
Any node within a cascaded configuration can be set to BIG. For more information about
Cascading
refer to Page 12.
Hard drive A and B are concatenated into a single virtual
volume
in the Figure below with a
storage capacity that is equal to the sum of each of the physical hard drives A and B.
Figure 2 - BIG storage policy sample configuration
It is also possible to create a BIG volume using only a single hard disk drive connected to Port 0,
and then increase the storage capacity of the volume later by adding another hard disk drive (or
another CoolMax CD-320 with at least one hard disk drive) to Port 1 and pressing the Mode
Change push-button. The new disk blocks of Port 1 will be concatenated to the end of the disk
blocks of Port 0, and any data that is stored on the existing BIG volume will be preserved.
However, it is not possible to expand an existing BIG volume by adding another hard disk drive
to Port 0 and still preserve any existing data on that volume.
JBOD
The JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) storage policy enables each hard drive to be seen separately
as one drive. When using a SATA host controller, JBOD should only be used if the SATA host
controller provides Port Multiplier (PM) support. If a host is not PM-aware, only a single drive
is presented (drive 0). No such limitation if using a USB host connection.
JBOD storage policy is available in the SteelVine Manager for a standalone (non-cascaded)
Storage Processor or the top-level node of a cascaded configuration, but not for subordinate
CD-320
