Can i make 2 different SanDisk SSD's with different capacities appear as one drive, with no drawbacks?

[giggsy11]

Hi Everyone,

I currently have a SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB SATA III SSD and I’m very soon going to be purchasing new SanDisk 960gb SSD (either the cheaper Ultra II or the Extreme Pro, if it comes down in price) The reason I am sticking to SanDisk is a little silly in that I have 2 SSD mounts viewable through the side window of my case and for aesthetic reasons I want both SSDs to look similar.

Anyway, I want to combine the 256GB drive and the 960GB drive to show as one drive, with Windows and all my games installed in one location. After googling I am seeing that Raid 0 may either result in a loss of capacity with different sized drives/performances/other issues.

So my question. Is there a way I can do the above without any loss of performance/drive capacity, baring in the mind the Ultra II and Extreme Pro are faster than the Ultra Plus and I would like to see those benefits if possible. I do remember hearing about a feature that seems to be able to do what i just said but without any benefits/drawbacks of Raid 0 but for the life of me i can't remember what it was called.

Also, i recently missed out on an offer for the Extreme Pro which is the one I want, it was around £50 more expensive than the Ultra II and I’m wondering if I see it for a similar price again is it worth spending the extra on the Extreme Pro over the Ultra 2?

Many Thanks.

 

[Its_Byte_00]

Hi Everyone,

I currently have a SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB SATA III SSD and I’m very soon going to be purchasing new SanDisk 960gb SSD (either the cheaper Ultra II or the Extreme Pro, if it comes down in price) The reason I am sticking to SanDisk is a little silly in that I have 2 SSD mounts viewable through the side window of my case and for aesthetic reasons I want both SSDs to look similar.

Anyway, I want to combine the 256GB drive and the 960GB drive to show as one drive, with Windows and all my games installed in one location. After googling I am seeing that Raid 0 may either result in a loss of capacity with different sized drives/performances/other issues.

So my question. Is there a way I can do the above without any loss of performance/drive capacity, baring in the mind the Ultra II and Extreme Pro are faster than the Ultra Plus and I would like to see those benefits if possible. I do remember hearing about a feature that seems to be able to do what i just said but without any benefits/drawbacks of Raid 0 but for the life of me i can't remember what it was called.

Also, i recently missed out on an offer for the Extreme Pro which is the one I want, it was around £50 more expensive than the Ultra II and I’m wondering if I see it for a similar price again is it worth spending the extra on the Extreme Pro over the Ultra 2?

Many Thanks.

extreme pro seems to be a big upgrade.

you can use multiple steam libraries in order to install games on 2 separate drives.

 

[APassingMe]

You can use "spanned volumes" when doing the initial formatting to make them all look like one big drive. However there is no speed advantages and if one drive goes down then you will lose whatever data that is on that drive ([strike]the other drive should still be usable at that point, as is[/strike], technically this is true but the controller will lock the entire volume down since part of it failed so you won't have normal access to your files). You will have to use recovery software to recover the data from the good drives even if the file index was not lost in the process, however any data that is on the good drives in entirety (not spanned across two drives) will be easily recoverable with a basic file recovery scan.

Server fault link with information on data loss and recovery from a spanned volume.

Anyway, that's probably what you're looking for, here's a link with some details if you want to look it up lifehacker link

Does not apply to the boot drive!

 

[hdmark]

sell the smaller drive and get the faster version of the bigger drive 😀

not that this answers your question at al...

 

[giggsy11]

Thanks for the replies, as i said, i'd like to see the drive as one with no performance loss from the fastest drive and with the full amount of GB's/TB's available to me.

What is JBOD? Is this a method i could try to achieve the above?

If there is no way to utilise all the space from both drives along with the performance then i will just run them as separate drives.

 

[jsmithepa]

I would want to know, if one is able to span drives, will it fill up the first completely before writing to the second? and does TRIM work on spanned drives?

 

[giggsy11]

So is their no way i can do this? Impossible for me to combine two different size SSD's with the speed of my fastest drive and full capacity of both?