trying to combine sata drives windows 7


  1. galaxyjim
    Posts : 3
    Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
       New #1

    trying to combine sata drives windows 7


    i am so hopping that someone has a answer that i can understand or a link that will guide me i just got a gateway desktop that has two 500GB sata hard drives and they do OK but i was wondering if there is a way to combine them to have one large HDD the way it is now i have the C:// drive with the install partition and then the E:// drive is the other 500GB would prefer to have a spanned volume or a raid 0 i think they also call it JBHD is this possible without losing my data from my C:// drive thank you in advance
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  3. TVeblen
    Posts : 6,292
    Windows 7 64 Bit Home Premium SP1
       New #2

    Sorry, but before getting into it I've got to ask: why do you need to do this? What do you hope to gain?
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  4. galaxyjim
    Posts : 3
    Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
    Thread Starter
       New #3

    a hope to be able to use both hard drives as one and increase capacity to my c drive
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  6. Lady Fitzgerald
    Posts : 9,600
    Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit
       New #4

    I'm thinking what you want may wind up being more hassle than you would want to deal with. RAID 0 and JBOD both will give you a single volume but, if one drive goes belly up, you will lose data from both drives. You would have to backup your data files and image your system files before implementing RAID 0 or JBOD to avoid losing anything. I personally do not recommend either one.

    You can use Windows Libraries to get a single directory of your two drives. This is what I plan on doing when I get around to setting up my video drives. The only downside is you will still have to specify which drive whenever you want to save data to since a Library will default to the first drive in the Library unless told otherwise. With Libraries, if a drive dies, you only lose data on the one drive, simplifying and minimizing recovery effort.

    Something else I recommend doing is making a separate partition (C: ) on one drive for System files (OS and programs) and using the remaining space for a separate data partition. This will dramatically simplify backing up and recovering your system and data files.
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  7. galaxyjim
    Posts : 3
    Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
    Thread Starter
       New #5

    that single directory my be something to look into have any links that you could share that would be great thanks
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  8. Lady Fitzgerald
    Posts : 9,600
    Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit
       New #6

    You might start reading here.
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