Combining 2 physical SSDs into a single volume

[rmarier83]

On my brother's computer, his Local Disk (C Drive) is running low on space. I had an extra SSD laying around, but it's already the same size as his SSD. Then I tried extending the volume of that SSD onto the extra one, which I found out you couldn't do, unless they're Dynamic Disks. I converted the extra SSD already into a Dynamic Disk, but I'm worried to do it on his Boot SSD, as he could lose his files that way. I'm not even sure if having both disks as dynamic will even work for my problem of trying to take both of these physical SSDs into one volume. I also have the Easeus Partition Manager program, but that didn't help any.

So I'm just looking for the best and easiest way of getting both of these SSD's to be read as the same Drive letter/volume. If I do need to make a backup, let me know.

 

[USAFRet]

So I'm just looking for the best and easiest way of getting both of these SSD's to be read as the same Drive letter/volume. If I do need to make a backup, let me know.

Why?
That is far more a problem than just having multiple drives.
OS and applications on the "C" drive, other stuff on the D or E drive...whatever it is.

You just have to be smarter than the install routines.

 

[rmarier83]

I guess I should've mentioned I've already cleaned his C drive the best I could with things like Disk Cleanup, and just manually looking for big files and moving them onto his 4TB drive. He uses a lot of Adobe suite programs, so they can easily take up a lot of space.

 

[Mike_106]

I've used two SSD's as a single volume in my Dell Optiplex 990 since around 2011. I set them up in the RAID BIOS as a RAID0, thus making two 128GB drives appear to the operating system as a single 256GB disk. It's easy to do, the only thing it takes is you have to plan for it in advance. In your case you might have better luck making an image of the current drive (using something like the Windows built-in backup tools onto an external HD), then installing a new, larger drive, and restoring that image onto the new drive. That's what I'd do if I were in your shoes. Also, CCleaner! 😉

 

[USAFRet]

And what size are these SSD's?

 

[JackNaylorPE]

No matter where ya set Adobe to install, you still wind up with "CommonFiles" installed to C:\

Some things you can do....

1. Search for and delete all tmp files
2. Search for and delete all dmp files
3. Move e-mail off the C:\drive (my backup e-mail file is 17 GB)
4. Move all user files (pics, docs, etc off the C:\ drive)
5. Sort files by size, biggest at top, and look for randomly stored files like mp4's and such
6. Has temp and page files been moved off C:\ ?

My list in the past went to 10... don't know whether I'm up too late or just old

In this situation, a large SSD or a SSHD can do wonders

 

[Rookie_MIB]

There are two ways to do it.

Option 1 is to create a striped raid array (Raid 0) which creates a single logical drive out of both physical drives, and utilizes two sata channels to increase read and write performance. You could clone the drive to a backup drive, create the raid volume, then re-clone it back. Advantages? Single volume with double the size. Speed increase. Downsides? Lot of work to set up. Failure of one disk means you lose ALL data.

Option 2 is to mount the second drive under the first drive. Windows 7 and later allows you to do this and it's similar to how Linux handles file systems and mounting drives. You have your C drive. You create a subdirectory called something like 'extraspace' or 'drive2' or whatever you want to mount it as. Then (with the D drive attached normally via power and sata and recognized and formatted for use), you go to 'control panel' 'administrative tool' 'computer management' 'storage' 'disk managment'. Pane on the bottom which lists the drive, right click your d: drive, select 'change drive letters and paths', hit 'change', then instead of a drive letter, select 'mount in empty ntfs folder' - then browse to the empty directory you created. What will happen is then you'll only 'see' the c: drive, and when you save something in that special directory, it will save the data technically to what was the d drive. If you save it anywhere else, it saves on the actual c: drive. Advantages? Simplicity, doesn't require cloning things all over the place, reversible without any data loss. Disavantages - you can still run out of space on one drive if you're not careful where you save things.

I've never tried it but it would be interesting if you could mount your 'program files' directory that way. Then any programs you install would automatically install to the secondary drive.