We have limited experience with VMS, and the only one we have used is Milestone. From what I remember, we had to choose a specific drive letter. What if we are using multiple drives but no RAID? can we just combine the drives to create one volume/drive letter?
How to combine multiple hard drives into one volume on Windows 10
I have a couple of thoughts on this. First and foremost I would avoid spanning multiple drives into a single striped pool because if you have one drive fail then the entire pool is lost. So with that said I would only make multi drive pools with some type of redundancy built in (eg RAIDZx or RAID5/6)
Secondly as for How VMS's handle the drives, you should have no problem using separate drives (D:,E:,F:,G: etc..) In Milestone I would look in the "Configure Dynamic Paths..." area.
If you are going to utilize a RAID config be mindful of disk size and rebuild times when designing the individual pools. With current drive sizes being so large, the rebuild / re-silver is likely to reduce performance and possibly cause additional drive failure during the process.
Dynamic paths is not an option in the Advanced VMS/C code versions.
You need to create several storage "paths" (one "path" per drive for example), and manually distribute cameras between them.
Are you looking for a low cost solution or are you needing to work with what you have?
I would not set up VMS storage as JBOD, you can but as already mentioned one failure and you lose everything. Mapping small clusters each to their own drives is still JBOD even if using one disk(same risk). Not all VMS systems can map individual cameras to individual drives, such as ONSSI which will take every camera subscribed to the recorder and distribute to any available zones (storage space, raid array, lun, nas, san etc.) configured with the seetec zone list. There are a lot of alternatives but they all start out with costs & budget.
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