Chapter 4 Configuring the HDD Mode
Before you use the device to configure the HDD mode, take a minute to study
the following terms. The terms represent the configuration options for mapping
the physical to the virtual drives. You will choose from these options during the
configuration process. Your choice is important and impacts how best you can
use the device.
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LNR
—A LNR (LINEAR) configuration is similar to using multiple hard
disks in a regular computer. It is the simplest configuration available but
provides no data redundancy. Each disk is an independent entity, and the
data on it is self-contained. You can add or remove the disks without
affecting the other disks. All the available disk space is used for data.
If your device has only one disk, you must use a LNR configuration.
However, you can use a LNR configuration for two disks as well.
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BIG
—A BIG (BIG) allows the device to make any two disks (same or
different size) appear as one large disk for extra capacity. If you have two 6
GB disks in a BIG, you will have one 12 GB virtual disk. You will write data
to the first disk until it fills, then write to the second disk – enabling you to
dynamically expand storage capacity and file system size.
For BIG, your device must have two disks and the disks can be any size.
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RAID 0 (FAST)
—Instead of writing all the data to one disk in a LNR or
BIG fashion, some bytes are written to one disk, and other bytes are written
to another. Performance is faster because reading and writing activities can
occur on two disks simultaneously. All the available disk space is used for
data. If you have one 30 GB disk and another 20 GB disk in a FAST, you
will have one 40 GB virtual disk (twice the size of the smaller disk, in this
case 20 GB multiplied by 2).
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