Combining two hard drives while installing windows 10

[schmidtyb43]

So I have a homebuilt gaming PC which I had originally installed a 1 TB WD hard drive. About a year later I needed more storage and so I ended up buying the same drive again so that I could have more space but all I did was just create another volume and then move certain things over to that drive. I am now in the process of upgrading from windows 8.1 to windows 10 and I was going to do a clean install. Is there also a way, while I'm going through the trouble of reformatting everything, to format my two hard drives into one? I've been looking around and see that people have been talking about setting up RAID arrays but I was just curious as to if there was an easier way to go about this. Thanks for the help.

 

[TechyInAZ]

Yes you can do that. It's called RAID 0. It doubles your capacity and doubles your HDD speed (because half of all your data is going to one drive), but it also doubles to quadruples reliability issues. So make sure you have a backup. It's not hard to setup, if you follow a tutorial it will be easy.

Install windows 10 first then do the RAID to be safe...

 

[schmidtyb43]

Great thanks, when you say reliability issues do you mean a complete hard drive failure is much more likely or I may encounter other smaller issues? And that being said, would you still say its worth doing that seeing that this is true and are there any tips you could give as to prevent these things from happening?

 

[Solandri]

Conceptually, there are two ways to do this with two very different consequences.

RAID-0 is also called striping. You take two identical drives and make the work together. Any file you write gets split into two, with each half being written to a separate drive. This means the file can (in theory) be read and written faster. But it also means if one drive dies all your data is gone (because half of each file is gone). The speeds don't really pan out in practice, unless you're writing large sequential files (e.g. real-time video editing). So you end up with something a tiny bit faster or even slower, with double the risk of data loss. So I don't recommend RAID-0 except for very specific use cases (like real-time video editing).

The other method is JBOD or spanning. Here, the computer just writes each file to one drive, but all the drives look like one big drive (called a volume) on your desktop. There is no potential speed gain, but if a drive dies you only loose the data on that one drive. The data on the remaining drives will still be there. The other benefit is that you can span across more than 2 drives, and the drives don't have to be the same size and performance. If you've got a bunch of old disks sitting around and you want maximum space with minimum fuss (i.e. without having to create a D:, E:, F:, G:, H:, and I: drives), this is the way to go.

In Windows, you can do spanning by converting the drives into dynamic disks, and spanning them. Windows' implementation is not quite so robust and a drive failure will result in the entire volume failing. But from what I hear it is possible to read files off the surviving drives with regular data recovery tools, unlike with RAID-0. Nevertheless, you really should be keeping separate backups of all your data regardless of what type of drives or filesystems you use.

In your particular case, I'm guessing you have the OS on the original 1 TB drive. Unless you know what you're doing, have a backup of the system drive, and a replacement drive you can swap in at a moment's notice, I never recommend RAID-0 or spanning on an OS partition. So what you'll want is to shrink the OS partition to a comfortable size for just the OS and programs (about 250 GB should be good, though it varies depending on how you use your storage). Create a second partition on that disk for data, and make it dynamic. Make the second disk dynamic as well, and span it with the 2nd partition on the 1st disk. So you'll end up with a 250GB C: drive, and a 1.7 TB D: drive.

 

[schmidtyb43]

Awesome, that seems like the way to go thanks for the help. And I always keep a backup of my drives so that should not be a problem.