Storage Smarts Were you correct? This week's answer is:
d. JBOD

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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.



Wondering if RAID or JBOD is right for your organization? Check out this tip by Rick Cook.

Talk with your peers about disk storage in the discussion forums.

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This was first published in June 2002