Changing Spanned Volume Order

[Christopher Vinciguerra]

So, I have my SSD boot disk, and 2 1TB drives that I use. I have them partitioned off into games, and then my other media. I want to have my games partition that's taking up all of one drive be spanned across maybe half my second disk, but in doing so, I would be pretty much only using that second disk, which is newer and I want to save writes on. I there a way that I can change the "order" of these disks in the spanned volume so say when I run a defrag I only write the entire disk once with games I'm keeping for a while and use the older one as the disk that gets written to with new programs?

Wow that sounded confusing.

UPDATE: I drew a diagram to help explain my point.

The grey is filled space, and the purple is free space. As you can see, I have a drive that is dedicated to games, and about 3/4ths full, that spans to my second drive which is half games and half other media. I have certain games I'll never delete that I would like to be written to once on the second drive, making that drive "first" in the volume span, so the "half games drive" will be filled up and the games drive will be 1/4 full, with all games installed after being written there. This keeps my POH lower, and helps with read and write speeds. Is there a way to change the order so when I defrag all data will fill the "half games drive" before filling the 1 tb drive?

 

[USAFRet]

which is newer and I want to save writes on

This is an SSD?

Please, please don't fall into the trap of thinking that too many write cycles is still a 'thing'. Current SSD's will last years before it even comes a little bit close to 'too many write cycles'.
It will be obsolete due to size long before it wears out.

Also, if this is an SSD, don't defrag. It serves absolutely no purpose.

If this is an HDD, then you really, really, really don't need to worry about 'saving writes'.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, @Christopher!

It does sound a bit confusing to us. However, if you share a screenshot of your Disk Management, it might help us visualize & understand your problem. If your 2 1 TB HDDs are in one spanned volume,in order to move your data to the start of the volume, you wil need a defragging software.
However, just like @USAFRet mentioned, it's really nothing to worry about when it comes to mechanical hard drives. If you are concerned about their state, simply use the HDD manufacturer's brand-specific diagnostic utility to monitor their SMART attributes & health.

Hope this helped. Best of luck!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[Christopher Vinciguerra]

Hey there, @Christopher!

It does sound a bit confusing to us. However, if you share a screenshot of your Disk Management, it might help us visualize & understand your problem. If your 2 1 TB HDDs are in one spanned volume,in order to move your data to the start of the volume, you wil need a defragging software.
However, just like @USAFRet mentioned, it's really nothing to worry about when it comes to mechanical hard drives. If you are concerned about their state, simply use the HDD manufacturer's brand-specific diagnostic utility to monitor their SMART attributes & health.

Hope this helped. Best of luck!
SuperSoph_WD

I havent partitioned it yet but I drew a picture to help explain my goal. I hope this makes myself less confusing.

 

[USAFRet]

Personally, I'm not a fan of spanned volumes/drives. Just makes more complexity for later, if you want to move one.

1 drive for games, 1 drive for media.
Or, on the second drive - 2 top level folders. 1 for 'other games', 1 for 'media'.
Done.

Trying to optimize for defrags is not needed. Data that is not fragmented will not be messed with during a defrag operation.
Write it once, it pretty much stays there.


And by having 2 individual drives and drive letters, you can absolutely tell the install which drive to install a specific game to. That functionality is built into the OS and the Steam client.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there again, Christopher!

I'd totally agree with @USAFRet that having two separate volumes (HDDs) would be a much easier storage setup to manage.
You should be aware that whenever you extend a spanned storage to create one single volume in the dynamic disk group, no portion of it can be deleted or formatted without deleting the entire spanned volume. This basically puts all the files in the Spanned storage in jeopardy. It doesn't have any redundancy and no fault tolerance - in other words - if one of your 1 TB HDDs fails, you will lose the data on both drives.

If you decide to separate the volumes, make sure you backup all the data from the Spanned volume somewhere off-site and then proceed to getting the HDDs back to basic/standalone secondary storage drives.

Hope this was helpful.
SuperSoph_WD