mmaston@portia.Stanford.EDU (Michael Maston) (02/13/90)
This may be a strange question but, I just became the proud owner of several Conner CP-340 hard drives and I am installing them in my A2000 with the Seagate ST-277N already there. I was thinking that it is somewhat annoying to have to have several volumes (DH0:, DH1:, DH2:, etc). Is it possible in the Mountlist to just list all the drives (Unit #, cylinders, etc) under one volume name such as DH0: and have all the separate hard drives appear as one huge contiguous drive? I haven't found anything in the manuals about something like this, but it sure would be convenient! Any ideas are welcome! Mike
jms@tardis.Tymnet.COM (Joe Smith) (02/24/90)
In article <9124@portia.Stanford.EDU> mmaston@portia.Stanford.EDU (Michael Maston) writes: >I was thinking that it is somewhat annoying >to have to have several volumes (DH0:, DH1:, DH2:, etc). Is it possible >in the Mountlist to just list all the drives (Unit #, cylinders, etc) under >one volume name such as DH0: and have all the separate hard drives appear >as one huge contiguous drive? Can't be done in the current AmigaDOS. It has no concept of what you're talking about. Each drive has to be treated individually. Having all the disks appear as one large logical disk is not a good thing, compared to the alternatives. BT Tymnet has one system in which DSKB: consists of 13 disks, 600 megabytes each. Unfortunately, this 7.8 gigabyte logical disk is vulnerable to hardware failures. If one disk goes out, we lose everything, instead of only 1/13th of the data. This is because the directory may be on one disk, the file header on a second, and the data spread across several others. Logical disk = all or nothing. (You don't want to know how long it takes to restore the files from forty-seven 2400-foot 6250-bpi tapes.) >I haven't found anything in the manuals about something like this, but it >sure would be convenient! What would be convenient, however, would be the equivalent of the MS-DOS JOIN command, which allows the root directory of one disk to appear as a subdirectory of another disk. Or use the Unix design for file systems. That way the disks are still independent at the low level (seperate root directories, block allocation tables, etc) so that a hardware failure affects only the one disk. But at the high level, the Amiga file requestors can treat them all as one large disk. Isn't that what you really want? -- Joe Smith (408)922-6220 | SMTP: jms@tardis.tymnet.com or jms@gemini.tymnet.com BT Tymnet Tech Services | UUCP: ...!{ames,pyramid}!oliveb!tymix!tardis!jms PO Box 49019, MS-C41 | PDP-10 support: My car's license plate is "POPJ P," San Jose, CA 95161-9019 | humorous dislaimer: "My Amiga speaks for me."