JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) concatenates disks to increase capacity. If one fails, generally only the files physically stored on that unit are lost. The recovery challenge is reconstructing the logical file system that may be fragmented across the physical boundaries of the involved disks. [Image illustrating data concatenation across multiple disks in JBOD]
JBOD offers neither redundancy nor enhanced performance; it only combines disks into a continuous logical volume (spanning). If one fails, the data after the damaged disk is usually lost, but the previous data remains accessible. The challenge lies in file systems like NTFS or ext4 that fragment large files across the entire volume. Experts create images of the surviving disks, identify the original concatenation order, and manually reconstruct the super block or MFT to correctly map the fragments. In many cases, most files are recovered, especially if action is taken before reusing the remaining disks.
