glossary

Spanning | Hard Drive Spanning


Spanning is the configuration of two or more physical drives into one ‘logical’ drive.  The logical drive is treated exactly the same as a physical drive and will appear as just one device.  Spanning is used to increase the amount of storage capacity of an array.  As an example: if three 100 gigabyte hard drives are configured as one spanned array, the result would be one logical drive 300 gigabytes in size.

Spanning alone provides no redundancy or fault tolerance and it is commonly combined with mirroring.

Technical Terms