Backup school: Quiz two, answer eight

Question #8

What is JBOD:

a. Just a Bunch of Disks
b. Jobs Bundled on Disks
c. Justified Batches on Delivery
d. None of the above

Were you correct?

The correct answer is:

a. Just a Bunch of Disks.

Learn more:

JBOD (for "just a bunch of disks," or sometimes "just a bunch of drives") is a derogatory term - the official term is "spanning" - used to refer to a computer's hard disks that haven't been configured according to the RAID (for "redundant array of independent disks") system to increase fault tolerance and improve data access performance.

The RAID system stores the same data redundantly on multiple disks that nevertheless appear to the operating system as a single disk. Although, JBOD also makes the disks appear to be a single one, it accomplishes that by combining the drives into one larger logical one. JBOD doesn't deliver any advantages over using separate disks independently and doesn't provide any of the fault tolerance or performance benefits of RAID.

Related articles:

  • New FC-AL technology ushers in "SBOD"
  • Disk cost busters: How to leverage low-cost solutions
  • What about D2D with iSCSI SANs?

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    This was first published in April 2004

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