Question : Problem: Sharing a Windows Vista Dynamic Spanned Disk Array

    I recently purchased three 1TB drives, and I initially set them up in a RAID 5, but the write speed was terrible, so I switched to just using Windows to create a JBOD (i.e. dynamic spanned disks).  My problem is that now I cannot see the new 3TB drive on my other PC; I have it shared just like the my other drives are, but no matter what I try I cannot access the shared drive over my network.

1) Is there something special I need to do to share this JBOD (Windows dynamic spanned disks)?

2) Besides not being able to install an OS on the drive, is there a disadvantage to using Windows dynamic spanned disks?

Answer : Problem: Sharing a Windows Vista Dynamic Spanned Disk Array

Your hunch is spot on.  When you use spanning, the system treats all 3 disks as one logical volume.  The only difference is that the data is sequential (anything past the 1/3rd mark is on the 2nd drive, and anything past the 2/3rds mark is on the third drive).  In most cases, the entire volume is toast if one of the drives fails.  However, with JBOD, your chances of recovering data from the disks that are still good is way better than it would be if they were RAID 0 (which is next to nil).  If you formatted the first disk, and then expanded the volume onto the other two, it's even better because all of the NTFS filesystem structures are on the first disk.