Also Jon

Windows, since Win98 when the FAT32 format came along, has been able to mount multi-disk drives. A "spanned volume," (say D:\ for example) can be composed of up to 26 physical drives and can have at total of up to 2TB space - and the whole thing could be all called "D:\."

It hasn't been done much, possibly because most people have enough trouble keeping one or two drives up and in good shape without worrying about more complex setups. Even though the "drive control" is available to do it, there are other limitations and most user machines haven't had fast enough I/O and/or enough RAM to do the bookkeeping, as examples.

I'm not sure that being able to do that actually depends on using FAT32 or better format; but the descriptions for how to do it don't seem to appear before then. With earlier versions, you may also have needed drivers/controllers that weren't in the default installation; but it does appear(?) that they were available.

With Win2K, descriptions for "Mirror Volumes," where everything is written to two separate physical drives, began to get some visibility. I think this is what's called a Raid(0) configuration?

Windows also offers "Stripe Volumes" (Raid(3)?) in which everything is written (randomly?) to two out of three physical drives. The individual physical devices can be set up as "movables" so that a failed drive can be removed and replaced without reboot.

Most of the stuff I've seen is written in terms of Win2K, NT4, or WinXP (or later) but I don't know that these last two require them. They wouldn't have been too useful at "user level" with the hardware available with most earlier versions.

These "other kinds" of drive layouts (Mickey now calls them "volumes" rather than "drives" or "partitions.") are only of academic/curiosity interest to me, and probably to you too; but they are out there "in the Window(s)."

John