Two harddrives, one partition?

T

theodors

New Member
Hello
Is it posible to merge two harddrives (in my expamle two ide drives) in to one "virtual" partition. Im actually expecting the answer - no. :D
 
You cant merge two drives together unless you use RAID 0, but even then the drives cant be different (like a 160GB IDE and a 250GB SATA).
 
there is actually (or was at one point) a software based solution that allowed you to stripe drives of different sizes, however it sucked and no one used it. I don't even remember what it was called but it first came out right when windows 2000 came out (so like late 1999ish). My old co-worker at the time had it on his desktop at home and it was pretty much useless.

Unless you would actually benefit from running a RAID I do not suggest you even try to set one up. It really is not worth the effort or risk for your average end user. It also gives pretty much no system performance increase for gaming.
 
Windows XP has built in whats called dynamic disks and you can setup software raids with mirror, striped or spanned volumes.

Mirror raid volumes mirror whats on the first hard drive the the second.

Striped raid volumes require two hard drives of the same size and will divide the data between the two. If you use two hard drives of seperate size the raid partition will only be ad big as the smaller hard drive mulitplied times to.

Spanned raid are similar to striped except you can use any number of hard drives of any size. It combines all the hard drives to form 1 drive in windows.
 
psych0fish said:
Windows XP has built in whats called dynamic disks and you can setup software raids with mirror, striped or spanned volumes.

Mirror raid volumes mirror whats on the first hard drive the the second.

Striped raid volumes require two hard drives of the same size and will divide the data between the two. If you use two hard drives of seperate size the raid partition will only be ad big as the smaller hard drive mulitplied times to.

Spanned raid are similar to striped except you can use any number of hard drives of any size. It combines all the hard drives to form 1 drive in windows.
Click to expand...

Yes, this is totally possible but what fish here didn't mention is that all of these software based methods are pretty much useless to the average user. Before windows adapted this into their OS (which I totally forgot about, thx fish) there was a third party app that did this exact function. MS probably bought them out and swallowed them into the OS, that is just my guess.

Software raids and mirroring have a few things wrong with them. If you get a glitch or virus or spyware, its mirrored to your mirror drive immediately. Mirroring also decreases performance because both drives have to be in sync to read/write data at the same time.

RAID 0 (or striping) is less stable because it spans data among two or more disks. If any disk fails your data is hosed.

Of course a lot of that is listed in RAID 101 or whatever that link is up there.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top