Is there a way to use 2 SSDs together without raid ?

One Man

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Apr 11, 2013
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This week im building my pc i want to know is there a way to use 2 SSDs together without using raid ?/how ? Because i don't want to mirror the SSds like if i have 2 512Gb SSDs can i make and will it stay as fast ? them one 1Tb SSD ? And also i will be using a 3Tb HDD .
If it helps i will be using an asus iv rampage extreme , 1 512Gb OCZ vector SSD and 1 samsung 265Gb SSD ,
1 3Tb Wd and a 3930K hexa core 12Mb
 
Solution
Is this Windows 7 or 8? You can use RAID 0 or you can mount one of the SSD in the path of the other SSD. Some SATA controllers allow you to create a drive out of 2 drive JBOD. You could make one SSD be the C: drive and the other could be your mounted as "c:\Program Files" or whatever path makes the most sense in your situation.
No, you can't use them together without a RAID controller.

Your real-world performance will be the same if you just use the SSD drives separately.

You can install your O/S on your 256GB SSD and that can be your C: drive.
Your D: drive can be your 512GB SSD; you can use that drive for data/storage.
Your E: drive can be your 3TB HDD; you can use that drive as your backup drive.
 

Jim_L9

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Mar 10, 2006
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Is this Windows 7 or 8? You can use RAID 0 or you can mount one of the SSD in the path of the other SSD. Some SATA controllers allow you to create a drive out of 2 drive JBOD. You could make one SSD be the C: drive and the other could be your mounted as "c:\Program Files" or whatever path makes the most sense in your situation.
 
Solution
Win 7 Pro or Ult can do spanned volumes. Basically JBOD. There's no restriction that the volumes be the same size, so you could glom the 256 and 512 GB SSDs into what looked like a single 768 GB SSD.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772180.aspx

Unfortunately, I don't think you can boot from a spanned volume. And since it's not fault tolerant you basically double the chances of losing the contents of the SSDs. You don't get the speed benefit of RAID-0 either since the data isn't striped (half written to one drive, half written to the other). The OS just treats both drives as one contiguous disk. Your files will be written to one drive or the other, with few if any files straddling the two drives.

What exactly is it that you're trying to do? If all you want is to be able to access the contents of the second SSD via the same drive letter as the first SSD, you can create links/junctions to mount folders on the second SSD as folders on the first SSD. This is a little less flexible than a spanned volume (you have 256 and 512 GB capacity limits, instead of an aggregate 768 GB capacity limit). But it's safer and you can control which files go on which drive.
http://ipggi.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/windows-file-junctions-symbolic-links-and-hard-links/

I use this to trick Steam (which insists on putting all my games in the same directory tree) into installing some games on my SSD, other games on my HDD. And it's simple enough to rearrange because it's just a bunch of links. If I finish a game that's on my SSD, I can copy it to my HDD, and create a junction from its folder on the HDD to the original folder on the SSD. Likewise if I want to move a game from the HDD to SSD, I simply delete its junction on the SSD and copy the game's folder from the HDD to the SSD. The OS thinks all the games were installed in C:/Games/Steam/* regardless of whether the files actually sit on the SSD or HDD.