Question Adding/increasing drive space

[Big_Gregg_B]

Good evening,

Currently my (SSD) C: Drive is only 250gb in size. I have purchased a second SSD drive which is 1tb in size. I was told at Micro Center, where I purchased it that I would in fact be able to (obviously) install the new drive, and add it's 1tb size to the current C: drive. giving me a total of 1.250tb in size for my C: drive.

I can't figure out how to do this. Is there a way to in fact combine the two?

Thanks in advance

 

[Yeldur]

As far as I'm aware, this would be done through "Disk Management"; you would need to right click on one target partition, delete it (IF YOU HAVE DATA ON THAT PARTITION YOU NEED TO BACK IT UP BEFORE YOU DO THIS) and then right click the other partition and choose the Extend Volume option, from there I believe it brings up a Wizard which you follow along with to make two partitions one.

To put it simply:

Step 1) Open up Disk Management (This is part of Windows, I'm assuming you are running Windows 10 as it is not specified)

Step 2) Right click on the target partition and delete the volume from feature list

Step 3) Extend the volume of the OTHER target partition

Step 4) Wizard will guide you through the rest

 

[USAFRet]

Good evening,

Currently my (SSD) C: Drive is only 250gb in size. I have purchased a second SSD drive which is 1tb in size. I was told at Micro Center, where I purchased it that I would in fact be able to (obviously) install the new drive, and add it's 1tb size to the current C: drive. giving me a total of 1.250tb in size for my C: drive.

I can't figure out how to do this. Is there a way to in fact combine the two?

Thanks in advance

No.
You can't just mesh the 2 physical drives to equal 1.25GB.
(Well, sort of you can via Storage Spaces, but don't do this.)

Just add that drive, and it will be another drive letter. You can use that for whatever you wish.
Install games on it, videos, music, etc...

 

[USAFRet]

As far as I'm aware, this would be done through "Disk Management"; you would need to right click on one target partition, delete it (IF YOU HAVE DATA ON THAT PARTITION YOU NEED TO BACK IT UP BEFORE YOU DO THIS) and then right click the other partition and choose the Extend Volume option, from there I believe it brings up a Wizard which you follow along with to make two partitions one.

No, you can't "Extend" across 2 physical drives.

 

[gn842a]

This is pretty complicated but it does get your other drives to show as a folder in your c: drive and that can be useful. I ran this system for five years. I gave it up because it really messed up my Carbonite backup. And I forgot why I did it. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-mount-hard-drive-folder-windows-10

 

[gn842a]

The problem with doing this is that no one ever does it so if you are ever talking to a support person he has to be pretty high up the totem pole and pretty expert to finally grasp what it is you did. I went up two or three levels at Carbonite before someone helped me figure it out. I think if you set up this way "you're on your own." GN

 

[DMAN999]

I agree with USAFRet.
Just install the new 1 TB SSD and use it as a Data drive.
I have a 500 GB SSD as my OS/boot drive and 1 TB SSD that I use to install games on and another 500 GB SSD that I use to store other data on.
I also have a 1 TB HDD that I use for general storage and backups.

 

[Big_Gregg_B]

Thanks, that is where I'm pretty much at... I've installed the new 1tb, and using it specifically as a data drive now. Thanks for verifying my suspicion. I guess worst case scenario I could just do a clean install of windows down the road and use the 1tb as the drive with my OS on it.

 

[Yeldur]

No, you can't "Extend" across 2 physical drives.

I've seen multiple sources online from performing research that suggest that it is possible, do you mind going into more detail on why it isn't? At the very least it would be helpful for me to expand my knowledge base, as I'm apparently lacking

Here are some sources of information I've found online suggesting that it is possible, these are just a few selected ones suggesting that it is possible one way or another, there are plenty more out there:

Can I combine two SSD together to form one disk? - Internal Hardware

Can I combine two SSD together to form one disk? - posted in Internal Hardware: My current SSD which holds the OS (Windows 10) and all my programs is running out of space - I think its a 225GB Intel SSD that i purchased 3 years ago. Anyway I was going to buy a larger disk maybe 500GB or 1TB...

www.bleepingcomputer.com

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-create-one-large-volume-using-multiple-hard-drives-windows-10
https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...ombine-2-ssds-for-one-total-capacity.1869444/
https://superuser.com/questions/1268096/combine-two-ssd-into-one-bootable-drive

Merging two SSD into one partition? - PC/Mac/Linux Society - GameSpot

I already have one Crucial m4 256gb ssd. I feel like if i can double that amount of space i would be set for a long time.Wanted to buy a 512gb one in the first place but at the time they weren't on sale.My question is if i buy another 256gb ssd can i

www.gamespot.com

https://askubuntu.com/questions/677...types-of-hdds-ssd-into-one-recognizable-drive

 

[USAFRet]

well, yes. Spanned or striped or RAID 0 can do that.
But not a simple "Extend". That doesn't work across physical drives.

But the spanning thing in Windows is an accident waiting to happen.
The physical drive space is the same, but the complexity and fail potential is increased.

 

[Yeldur]

well, yes. Spanned or striped or RAID 0 can do that.
But not a simple "Extend". That doesn't work across physical drives.

But the spanning thing in Windows is an accident waiting to happen.
The physical drive space is the same, but the complexity and fail potential is increased.

Ah okay, just checking to ensure I wasn't going barmy haha!

So generally speaking it is possible but overall not really recommended due to it more often than not doing more worse than good. Understood! Thanks for the help

 

[USAFRet]

500GB + 500GB + spanned in Storage Spaces = 1TB
500GB + 500GB also equals 1TB. Just without the complexity and fail potential.

 

[popatim]

Windows storage spaces creates a software raid which is not the same thing as extending a partition.

My one experience with windows mirror (Raid1) is bloody awful. The two drives go out of sync once or twice a month and being half full 3TB drives they take hours to resync. And it's almost always happens when I've not done anything with them...
I never had an issue with these same two drives in a mirror on my raid card.

 

[USAFRet]

"Spanned volume" issues:

Question - Windows 10 Spanned Volume Suddenly Missing (Dynamic Disks: "Invalid")

Hi, Normally I'd try quite a bit myself before posting here but I'm afraid to try much since data is on the line. As far as I can tell this seems to be a software issue rather than a hardware problem, though I can't be 100% sure. I say this because both drives involved are fairly new, still...

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