Combine multiple (4) hard drives into one large one, including current primary drive?

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Jakabo

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Oct 22, 2014
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I currently have one hard drive that has data on it (system, the OS, all my data, etc.), and I have three drives that I have deleted all the partitions on them. From here, I want to combine all four hard drives into what Windows treats as one large hard drive.

I have read that this can be done with a spanned volume, but I can't figure out how to do this.
Creating a spanned volume always seems to involve deleting all partitions on the drive, but if I were to delete all the partitions on my main drive, I wouldn't have windows running so that I could create a new spanned drive... this seems like a problem.


Specifics: the main drive is 70GB (66 usable), all three of the other drives are 40GB each (37 usable.) I want to combine these into a 180GB ish hard drive to use. I am running Windows 10, but it operates the same as Windows 8 or 8.1 for these purposes. I have created a system image to restore from if necessary.
 
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capt_taco
If you insist on doing it, I'd say your best option would be to wipe everything clean, set up all four drives as a hardware RAID0, then install the OS again. (If your old motherboard even supports it). Way better than trying to configure it with software.

Basically, understand that you are doing this just to experiment and see if you can. Which is fine, but be prepared for a fatal error at any moment. If that's OK with you, the above is the way I'd go.

By the way, do you even have enough power plugs on your PSU for all those hard drives?

If you're just looking to create a working machine, you're better off listening to the others. Hell, you can usually find a hard drive that size for $10 on Craigslist.

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USAFRet

USAFRet

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ronintexas

ronintexas

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I agree with USAFRet....given the age of those drives, and the complexity of software RAID to span the volumes, you are asking for a big time headache....If ONE of the four drives encounters issues, all FOUR are useless......

Save yourself the time and effort - purchase the $30/$50 hard drive, transfer the data, and retire those drives! :)
 
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J

Jakabo

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Oct 22, 2014
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The computer it is running on is a frankenstein computer anyways, and I'm just using it to play around with Windows 10 and to see how it handles a few other programs. I put it together from an old motherboard, graphics card, etc that we had from our past two computers. I got the three 40GB drives by asking one of my teachers if they had any extra hard drives I could keep.

I would really like to get this to work without spending money on a new hard drive. All of my documents are on onedrive anyways, so if it fails I just lose the work of downloading a few programs onto the computer so far.

So.... is it possible? Chance of failure is okay!
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Those drives are old. The likelihood of one of them failing is pretty large.

If you are determined to use those specific drives, would be FAR better to just leave them as individual drives.

But you could play with Storage Spaces if you want. Be advised, functionality in Windows 10 Tech Preview may and will change at any time.
 
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capt_taco

capt_taco

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Aug 5, 2009
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If you insist on doing it, I'd say your best option would be to wipe everything clean, set up all four drives as a hardware RAID0, then install the OS again. (If your old motherboard even supports it). Way better than trying to configure it with software.

Basically, understand that you are doing this just to experiment and see if you can. Which is fine, but be prepared for a fatal error at any moment. If that's OK with you, the above is the way I'd go.

By the way, do you even have enough power plugs on your PSU for all those hard drives?

If you're just looking to create a working machine, you're better off listening to the others. Hell, you can usually find a hard drive that size for $10 on Craigslist.

 
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