2 SSD's 1 Volume. Possible without Raid?

[JerrWolf]

Before we start, I know people argue if there is performance in Raid with SSD's.
I am not looking for performance, I would like to have my 2 SSDs meant for game storage as one volume.

Is this possible, through windows 10 or do I need to raid them?

If Raid is the answer, I don't care for if the files get lost some how, but I do care if the drives die because of it.

 

[geofelt]

I think you are looking for JBOD, or a dynamic spanned volume.
You can tell windows to treat multiple devices as one. That makes space management easier.
But, it is not clear to me what the recovery implications are if one of the volumes fails.
If your two ssd's are equal capacity, then raid-0 might have some benefits.
I did this some time ago without issue. There was no apparent performance advantage though.
Here is an explanation of the recovery implications.
Spanned volumes, unlike striped volumes, do not stripe data across all disks. This means that all data is written to the first logical disk in the span until it is filled, then additional data is written to the next logical disk, and so on.

This means that if a disk in a span fails, only the data that was written to that failed disk is gone. If you lost the first disk in a two-disk span, you'll lose the most data. If you lose the last disk in a span, you'll lose the least amount of data.

Any software capable of reading dynamics disks can get at data on remaining disks in a span, since whole files are stored on it - again, they are not striped across multiple disks. If this were a striped volume, this would not be the case. So, recovery of remaining files is very simple.

Recovery of files that were on the failed disk is a different story and would be the same as recovering data from a failed standalone disk. It depends on the what caused the failure.

 

[PsyKhiqZero]

What you can do is create a spanned volume. It's software based so no special hardware is needed and does add any CPU overhead.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753058.aspx#BKMK_WINUI

 

[USAFRet]

Why the need for one volume?
With Steam (or Origin) games, it is trivially easy to have them exist on multiple drives.

I guess you might do it with HomeGroup in Windows, but that is soooo not needed.

 

[JerrWolf]

That solution worked PsyKhiqZero. Thank you!
Also thank you Geofelt for the explanation!

USAFRet- OCD reasons.

 

[Robert_190]

Actually, it is my understanding, that in a spanned volume (one volume spread over anywhere from 2 to 32 separate disks), if ANY physical disk in the spanned volume fails, you will lose the entire volume. There is no fault tolerance.. Be aware of this if you want to create spanned volumes! My source here:
http://timourrashed.com/differences-between-partition-types/