[SOLVED] combining SSD's into one larger drive

nickbeef

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Jul 15, 2015
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I happen to have a bunch of spare SSD's lying arround including two Samsung 1TB SSD's, and two Crucial 250GB SSD's. I started thinking that perhaps I could combine these into one larger drive. I'm sure I can figure out how to do this, but my question is how important is it that they are the same drives and also the same size? I'm guessing that the two 1TB Samsungs would work well together, but then again one is a 1TB 850 Pro, and the other is a 1TB 840 EVO - I really don't know the difference between these. If I had to buy a new drive to add to this, it would likely be a 2TB Samsung 860 QVO, but would this be ok to add to the mix?

So, yeah, not sure if all these SSD's would need to be the same size in order to add them together, and also, does it make a difference that one is 850, other 840, and add 860? Pro, EVO, QVO? Will it work?
 
Solution
Is performance over your LAN acceptable? Can this video be edited over the LAN?
If so, a NAS box with whatever drives you want...all in one 'drive letter' in your workstation OS.

My QNAP has 2 main volumes visible to the PC...24TB (8+8+8) and 16TB (4+4+4+4).
Each mapped with an individual drive letter.

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
I started thinking that perhaps I could combine these into one larger drive
The only way to do this would be within Storage Spaces in Windows.
But that is a flawed tool.
When (not if) things go wrong with that...recovery of your data is problematic.

My system has 7x SSD (listed below). All independent drives. No 'combination'.
 

nickbeef

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Jul 15, 2015
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Ok, I'm looking into options to replace my (possibly) failing 4TB WD Black drive, which often fills up with video projects, and uses lots of data. In fact, I have one project that I haven't started editing yet that is itself at about 4TB of data (shooting 4K RAW video).

Hopefully WD will replace my drive (?? it hasn't actually failed yet), but if not my option is to either go out and buy another 4TB WD Black (at about $175) or make use of these SSD's I have lying around (adding 2TB SSD would cost about $200, so comparable) while at the same time getting a performance boost.

Either way, I basically need at least 4TB of usable space at a time, or else I'd be in hell of constantly moving projects, splitting projects, etc.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Is performance over your LAN acceptable? Can this video be edited over the LAN?
If so, a NAS box with whatever drives you want...all in one 'drive letter' in your workstation OS.

My QNAP has 2 main volumes visible to the PC...24TB (8+8+8) and 16TB (4+4+4+4).
Each mapped with an individual drive letter.
 
Solution

falcon291

Honorable
Jul 17, 2019
647
145
13,290
Ok, I'm looking into options to replace my (possibly) failing 4TB WD Black drive, which often fills up with video projects, and uses lots of data. In fact, I have one project that I haven't started editing yet that is itself at about 4TB of data (shooting 4K RAW video).

Hopefully WD will replace my drive (?? it hasn't actually failed yet), but if not my option is to either go out and buy another 4TB WD Black (at about $175) or make use of these SSD's I have lying around (adding 2TB SSD would cost about $200, so comparable) while at the same time getting a performance boost.

Either way, I basically need at least 4TB of usable space at a time, or else I'd be in hell of constantly moving projects, splitting projects, etc.
Your SATA ports are already full I guess. And as I wrote your case seems hot. It would cost you some money but İt is better to be safe than sorry, so for the internal drive buy one of the largest WD Black or Purple or Toshiba N300.

Buy the largest, buy 2, retire one other drive in your desktop, and run them in RAID. So only NVMe drives and these two big harddisks in RAID 1 stay in your desktop. All others retired. I think that would be better.

And if the things go like this, they might be the latest HDDs you will buy.
 
I am no expert on this, but I think there is a windows storage management capability called JBOD, (just a bunch of Disks)
It allows you to aggregate a bunch of individual drives to be managed under a single drive letter.
If a failure happens, you lose only the drive, not the whole bunch.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
I am no expert on this, but I think there is a windows storage management capability called JBOD, (just a bunch of Disks)
It allows you to aggregate a bunch of individual drives to be managed under a single drive letter.
If a failure happens, you lose only the drive, not the whole bunch.
Yes.
That's what I have running in my NAS box.
It fills up each drive consecutively. Good, but you never really know what is on each drive.
You the user sees a single volume of space.

And just like any other "RAID", i wouldn't do it without dedicated hardware.