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Is BIG a standardised format for Hard Drives

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  • 18-07-2014 2:14pm
    #1
    Laphroaig52
    Registered Users Posts: 1,099 ✭✭✭


    I have a dual bay USB enclosure with two 3.5" SATA (1TB & 500GB) drives configured as BIG. This is the 'puter sees them as one big 1.5" Drive. It's a noisy old enclosure and I only used it for back ups and leave it switched off most of the time.

    Anyway, it looks like the enclosure has failed - powers on but the drives don't spin up - and I want to replace it.

    If I get a new enclosure that supports BIG, will it just be a case of swapping the drives over? Or does each enclosure have its own ideas about how the BIG format should look?

    Alternatively, if I just want to pull the data off these drives, if I pop them into a single bay enclosure individually, will they be readable?


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    #2
    maki
    Registered Users Posts: 772 ✭✭✭maki


    BIG is just a spanned volume. I don't know of any hardware implementations, but it's supported natively in Windows anyway.

    So, yes, you should be able to just pop them in a new enclosure.

    Just be aware that, like RAID0, you have no redundancy with a spanned volume. If one drive dies you lose data on both. One drive will not work without the other.

    Honestly, a spanned volume has absolutely no benefits apart from having one less drive letter to worry about. Really not worth the risk.


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