Merging two hard drives

[StefanH]

Hey, I'm soon going to be building a computer for my friend and was wondering how i could "stack" the hard drives on each other so they have the same domain.

Im getting two WD caviar green's 1TB and wanted to have like C: drive with 2TB of storage rather than C: and D: drives.

I was hoping I wouldnt need to use Raid 0, because that puts, say one file on both. But rather some disk management utility where it automatically puts files into one hard drive till its full then it just goes on to the next one, but with only the C: drive domain.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Stefan

 

[sminlal]

RAID 0 doesn't put one file on both, it combines the capacity of both drives by putting half of the file on one and half on the other. So RAID 0 is exactly what you want to use for what you've described.

But IMHO you'd be better off just buying a 2TB drive. The only reason to use RAID 0 would be if you need faster transfer rates than a single drive can deliver.

 

[StefanH]

yeah thats what i meant to say XD, with the file split on both. My friend now wants 4TB's of space so ill just have to get 2 x 2TB hard drives in Raid 0. Thanks for the help, and the idea of using a single 2 TB hard drive.

Do you know any good guides for doing raid 0?
From your experience is it an easy thing to do?
You think WD Caviar Greens would be a good option?

Cheers,

Stefan

 

[jitpublisher]

Windows has software RAID built into it, and the feature you are looking for is called "Disk or Drive Spanning" You can read about it here.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/222189
You won't gain any performance advantage like you might with hardware RAID, but you can do exactly what you just said you want to do. Create a single volume across 2 disks, so that only 1 large disk is displayed.