Although system administrators probably took the pains of learning how to configure these devices, the only thing that you need to know in order to grasp the concept is that JBOD really is just a bunch of disks.
A question might be lingering in the form of “Why?” The answer is simple, which is to help enable you save on costs by not having to purchase more and more storage year after year. So, before you throw those old drives, take a moment or two to read this article.
This is where terminologies such as Desktop RAID, NAS Storage, JBOD, cloud storage come in. If you decide on getting a JBOD RAID system, for example you can combine your old hard drives who may have odd storage capacities into one singular but large virtual drive. For instance, you may have at your disposal old and dusty disk drives which have capacities of 10 GB, 20, GB and 40 GB. Now those three wouldn’t fit in most desktop systems right? So you get them in a JBOD RAID system and when you access the drives you only see a 70 GB drive.
That’s the beauty of these different storage systems, you get to pick one for a particular purpose that your organization or company needs. For instance, JBOD systems are good for archiving. RAID is good for close to paranoid backup systems because they provide multiple redundancies and NAS is good for networked backups.
For instance, if you have a JBOD system, you can get some old and dusty hard drives that are just lying in the corner and then put them in an enclosure to combine into one single virtual drive. This is useful whenever you want to backup not so critical information that’s needed to be backed up.
One of the advantages of having a unified virtual drive that is composed of smaller drives is simplicity. You may want to install a particular software or operating system on such a drive. Programs nowadays tend to have larger and larger requirements that wouldn’t fit in legacy disks. Also, it does away with the confusion that is inherent with multiple drive setups. You wouldn’t have to remember which disk drive you put a particular folder or file into.
Specific examples of more terminology includes “spanning” and “concatenation”. These are used in JBOD to delineate it from other storage principles. RAIDs are made of arrays that back up each other so that when a physical drive fails, you won’t have to scratch your head and worry because there are other copies on the other disks.
However, JBOD setups also has its own difficulty and that arises when one of the single drives fail. Remember that in RAID systems, the name itself implies a system wherein there are backups of backups. JBOD does not have that, and when one of the drives fail, you are bound to have to reconfigure and most likely lose the data that’s on the drive. But don’t take that the wrong way, there are a lot of data recovery software out there that makes it easy to get the files and documents that you need.
In a nutshell those are the advantages and disadvantages of a JBOD system. Perhaps another aspect of JBOD is that it is very cheap to implement and maintain. Most enterprises use JBOD as an archival system meant to keep backups of files that are not always used in the same level as active files. By using old and spanned disks, these files can be stored in an easy to access fashion that does not require extensive capital outlay.
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