IcyDock makes a 4 port chassis for SATA drives that allows you to build your own RAID out of large and inexpensive drives. The resultant JBOD can then be formatted into RAID0 or RAID1 (software RAID) and presented to backup applications (ie – Retrospect) as offline storage. Amazon sells an IcyDock, populated with 1.5TB drives for a total of 6TB, which is how I’m now snapshotting my VMs in my lab. I’m also using it as the backup destination for my home Kerio server. Works nicely so far. You can also buy the IcyDock with no drives and likely populate them with 2TB drives, although I haven’t tested this yet…
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Windows Server 2008: Expanding a Volume
You may find that a disk in Windows Server simply isn’t big enough for your greedy applications. But never fear, the good folks at Microsoft have given us the ability to expand that volume on the fly, as needed by adding other pools of storage or single disks to it. However, it’s important to keep in mind that if you have a highly available volume (let’s just say a RAID6) and you add a single disk to it then you have just effectively lost the high availability for the data stored on the extended portion of the volume. So make sure that the new storage you are adding matches up…