A Traditional volume can use space from up to 32 logical or physical devices. The volume can grow up to 1 TB in total size for all segments combined. Each segment of space is taken from a NetWare partition. The segments of space are automatically carved by the management tools when you create the volume.
The advantage of distributing a volume’s segments across multiple server disks is that different parts of the same volume can be read from or written to concurrently, which speeds up disk I/O.
Because of hardware restrictions, a hard drive can contain up to four NetWare partitions, or three NetWare partitions and one DOS partition. (The hard drive that contains the sys: volume also contains a DOS partition.)
Each NetWare partition can contain up to eight Traditional volume segments. Thus, a single server disk can contain up to 32 volume segments (4 NetWare partitions with 8 segments each). A single NetWare partition can contain up to eight Traditional NetWare volumes, each with a single volume segment.
A single disk can contain volume segments from multiple volumes. If a single disk fails, each volume segment on it fails, causing all of the volumes that have volume segments on that server disk to fail. To achieve fault tolerance, you should protect the volumes against disk failure by setting up a software RAID 1 (mirroring) device for the partitions. See Using Software RAID1 Devices for Data Fault Tolerance.
You can add volume segments to a Traditional volume if free space is available, but you cannot remove them. Removing a segment from a volume destroys the entire volume.
You can increase the size of a Traditional volume by adding another server disk to the NetWare server, setting up a NetWare partition on the disk, then adding one or more segments in the partition to the existing volume.