What Is JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) and Explore JBOD vs RAID

What Is JBOD

JBOD is short for Just a Bunch of Disks or Just a Bunch of Drives, which is a storage structure including multiple disk drives within one single storage enclosure. It refers to the hard disks on the computer that haven’t been configured in terms of RAID (Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks).

JBOD drives are individual drives, which means that drives in JBOD enclosure can function individually. And they configured to act as RAID under the help of correct host system technology.

-image from wikipedia.com

JBOD doesn’t provide fault tolerant or performance improvements. Based on this fact, it is not recommended for wide use. JBOD vs RAID 0: which one is better? Probably RAID 0 is better. Though RAID isn’t fault-tolerant neither, it offers performance enhancement compared with individual hard drives or JBOD.

What is JBOD? The above content is the basic information of JBOD. To get more information about JBOD, please keep reading this post of MiniTool.

Top recommendation: What Are Main RAID Types and Levels and How to Manage RAID

Main Advantages of JBOD

What are the main features of JBOD besides these talked about in above? According to summarization, they are listed as follows. In fact, these features can also be regarded as the advantages of JBOD.

Firstly, you can avoid drive waste by using JBOD. For instance, if you have a 10GB drive and a 40GB drive, they can be combined to a 50GB volume via JBOD without data loss. However, as drives are cheap now, this advantage probably is not so attractive. In addition, combining multiple drives into one can be troublesome for people who want to enlarge the current system.

Secondly, you can recover missing files because of disaster easily. If a drive fails in a JBOD enclosure, it can be recovered with ease. Nevertheless, the exact situation relies on the way that the operating system manages the disks. Hence, this advantage is not obvious.

Read here, you may have a further understanding of JBOD. Probably, this is why JBOD is not highly recommended for users.

RAID 1 VS RAID 5: What’s the Difference and Which One Is Better?

This post is mainly talking about RAID 1 vs RAID, and it also introduces RAID 1 and RAID 5. Read this post carefully to get detailed information.

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JBOD VS RAID

JBOD and RAID are two main data storage configurations. On that basis, many people discuss the difference on JBOD vs RAID. RAID or JBOD? You can compare them on some vital aspects and then make your choice.

Similarity

Before talking about the difference between JBOD and RAID, let’s discuss the similarity. Firstly, the purpose of them are identical. Both of them are applied to data storage. Secondly, they can make better use of disk space.

Difference

The RAID stores the same data repeatedly on multiple disks. However, these disks will be appeared on the operating system like a single disk. Similarly, JBOD makes the disks display on the OS as a single disk. Differently, JBOD will combine the drives into one larger logical one.

RAID is fault-tolerant and support hard disk failure. What’s more, it can boost performance. Whereas, JBOD doesn’t have these features. Even so, JBOD is becoming more and more popular. The reason behind this phenomenon is that modern file systems and software-defined storage methods becomes mature and can offer data protection.

JBOD vs RAID: which one to choose? You may have your answer at present.

Recommended reading: RAID 5 VS RAID 6 on Benefits, Performance, and Application

Bottom Line

What is JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks)? This post introduces JBOD comprehensively including its definition and main advantages. In addition, to help you make a wise choice, it discusses the heatedly talked about topic – JBOD vs RAID. Hence, you can grasp the meaning of JBOD and choose a suitable way to store your data after reading the post. Hope this article can be helpful for you.