Merging two physical HDDs

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Natedogg

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It's time for me to get a new hdd .I have my OS separate from my media and downloads for the sake of formatting. So what I want to do is merge the new 500GB with my old 500GB because if I don't, I would then have my 500GB hdd with about 450 GB free because I really want to keep my media in one place and not on two hdds. Has anyone successfully merged two physical HDDs?
Is it risky and not worth taking the chance ?, should I rather buy a 1TB harddrive and then keep my OS separate with 400+ gigs free?

thanks
 
I'm not sure what you mean by merge?? But it is possible to RAID them, i.e. put both drives into a RAID array for added redundancy. It will look like it is a single drive, but you won't get double the capacity (500gb + 500gb)
 
ToxicWazte said:
I'm not sure what you mean by merge?? But it is possible to RAID them, i.e. put both drives into a RAID array for added redundancy. It will look like it is a single drive, but you won't get double the capacity (500gb + 500gb)
Click to expand...

Nope, that's what I need, double capacity, otherwise I would just get the 1TB HDD...
 
easy, you put them into a "virtual" disk under disk manager and that would make it a 1TB disk

you have to have them as Dynamic disks first off all, and i "think" they have to be formatted before you can add them to the new 1TB virtual disk
 
Definitely available in Windows. I have my home server running with 6 x 160GB's hooked together to give about 900GBs of space which is very very fast (approximately 1800MB/sec burst speed). And then a 15000RPM 74GB system drive :) Also very fast.
 
You have two options:

You could configure them in a RAID0 volume. This would double your capacity, but if one disk fails then you lose all your data.

The other option is to span your disks. This will also give you one large volume, but unlike RAID0, will only write to one disk at a time i.e. it will fill up one disk first and then start writing to the next. If a disk fails then you will only lose whatever is on the failed disk.
 
In my personal PC I have my 2 x 500GBs spanned... I then spam the first 500GB of stuff that is easily replaceable on first then add the important stuff.
 
stroebs said:
In my personal PC I have my 2 x 500GBs spanned... I then spam the first 500GB of stuff that is easily replaceable on first then add the important stuff.
Click to expand...

So, once I have got the new drive and there is therefore unallocated space, could I just span it "on top" of my current 500GB HDD?
 
Would the original HDD(the one that I am spanning from) need to be empty (formatted) ?
 
That I am not sure about. I used two clean drives for my setup and it asked to format them and I accepted. I'm sure Conradl will answer that shortly.
 
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