JBOD possible?

I have a question regarding the *possibility* of using/implementing something along the lines of a "Just a Bunch Of Disk" (SPAN) solution under AmigaOS4.

The thought of concatenating odd-sized HDDs to one big volume is really captivating, especially when it comes to backup solutions (may it be over USB or directly installed into the system).

Would something like that be possible?

I'm looking at you @geenaam

Thank you

@Raziel

Yes, I don't see a reason why it isn't possible. It's a matter creating a vitual device driver with the total size of the BOD and redirecting IO to the right drive. Adding sodtware RAID 0 and 1 is also fairly easy.

There's actually already a software RAID driver on os4depot (swraid_device).

@Raziel
Additionally to the swraid.device from Fredrik Wikström on os4depot.net and Aminet I implemented a raid.device several years ago as well. IIRC it supported RAID 0, 1 and 5. No JBOD support, but RAID 0 in my implementation is faster anyway since it does reads/writes from/to the 2 drives at the same time (for large enough transfers) and that way can nearly double the speed, at least when using 2 different SATA controllers for the 2 HDs.
Not sure anymore, but I guess it was only available to the OS4 beta testers and there may have been no public release of it.

Using different size HDs is possible with it as well since it's using partitions (DOSType "RAID") instead of the whole HD, for example if you have a 250 GB HD and a 500 GB one you could use one 250 GB partition on the 250 GB drive and 2 250 GB partitions on the 500 GB drive for a 750 GB RAID 0 drive.

Don't use such large partitions with an ancient file system like FFS, SFS or (ex)FAT, but using NGFS or NTFS for it should be usable.

@joerg
@geenaam

Thanks guys, appreciated