Adding more hard drives

Hello!

I'm rapidly running out of space on my PC, so I'm contemplating a second 500gb drive. However, when I add that to my system I would like it to become integrated properly rather than just acting like a 500gb external drive, eg: although there are two 500gb drives the pc only sees them as one 1tb drive.

Is this possible?

I'm on Vista and the hard drives are SATA.

Cheers for any help

 

Your Answer is RAID, I think. (Someone correct me if there's another way to do it)
But whether your onboard SATA controller can build a RAID array from a blank disk and one with existing data on it (without wiping the data) is another matter entirely...

 

Sounds like jbod (Just a Bunch Of Disks) is what you're after.

 

with jbod would you have to reformat both of your drives? I've been looking at it and LVM recently but with lvm i'd need to reformat my disks.

 

I agree with kenco. Jbod sounds like the way to go

 

As far as I know, LVM is only available on Linux (I could be wrong on that score. I've only ever used it on a linux system before).

I think you can set it up as a RAID 1 device without losing all the data. Personally, I'd just go with the two drives, but I'm lazy that way.

Andy

 

Your right it is, that's where i was going to use it. True it doesn't help the OP.

 

I would too, but unfortunately windows will keep using the first drive and as soon as I want to start installing programs on it problems will start. Did on XP anyway.

 

JBOD provides no performance increase, but your data is still as at risk as it is in RAID. Either just bung the other disk in and leave it at that, or do RAID (or buy 2 and do RAID 5)

JBOD is really only useful if you have drives of different sizes that you want to use as a single drive AFAIK

 

I know windowsXP would let you create a RAID type setup from 2 drives, just go to the Disk Management and look in there

Regards
GiGo

 

To be honest, the only data I am fearful of loosing I have backed up already, so JBOD and RAID 0 seem like the 2 choices.

 

A double post 50 minutes apart... how the hell did I manage that

 

I thought JBOD wasn't an actual RAID setup (by definition) I thought it was just like having two seperate hard drives and having them completely seperate to use as you will. Such as one 500GB and one 320GB just sitting there as they are.

 

wikipedia says that it can combine lots of drives and windows will see it as one big virtual drive.

 

ah right, I thought it was literally "Just a Bunch Of Disks"

 

There's no point in JBOD if you have two drives of the same size - you should use RAID0 instead and get much better performance. RAID1 is just mirroring, so won't give you any extra space. If you have all your stuff backed up elsewhere, you should do RAID0.

 

Cool, RAID0 it is then!
Cheers for the help

 

Hmm... I'd say don't bother with RAID0, even though most of it is backed up already - it's a lot more trouble than it's worth, and, imo, JBOD is exactly what you want.

 

I have the same doubt.Can any one suggest me.

 

One little warning about the JBOD... one disk fails and the whole array is usually dead. So if you use 3 500 GB disks as a 1.5 TB drive and one of the 500 GBs dies you don't just end up with 1 TB again. You loose it all! But Raid 0 I believe has a similar issue. I could be wrong about the Raid 0. If somebody here is smarter than I am (Safe bet trust me!) please feel free to correct this.