How to increase storage space virtually ?

[Tan23]

Hello everyone,
I have a query about increasing storage space virtually on the same system.
1. I have two physical hard drives
2. One physical hard drive storage is full of data. (say: first hard drive)
3. second physical hard drive has sufficient free space.
4. I want to increase storage of first hard drive virtually by getting storage from second physical hard drive.

Any expert opinion please.
Thanks

 

[Wolfshadw]

It's called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks). There are multiple RAID Levels. What you are looking for is RAID 0 which uses a technique to write data across two (or more) physical disks.

Standard RAID Levels - Wiki

Note: You need to have this in place BEFORE you have any data on either disk

-Wolf sends

 

[Tan23]

thank you for your quick reply. It seems implementing RAID 0, failure of one drive will also fail other drive in any certain fault (low reliability). Can you please share the procedure for RAID 0.
Can we use RAID 0 to the existing drive which has already OS and boot system.?
Will the first drive be booted, if some time second drive is disconnected from the computer?

 

[Wolfshadw]

It's true that in a RAID 0 configuration that if one hard drive fails, any data in the RAID 0 array is lost and a back up would strongly be advised.
The procedure for setting up a RAID array is going to vary from motherboard to motherboard or from RAID card to RAID card. Consult your user's manual.
As I stated, you would need to set up the RAID array BEFORE any data was written to either disk or the data would be lost.
If the second disk is disconnected or fails for any reason, the RAID array is "broken" and all data is lost. This includes the ability to boot your system.

-Wolf sends

 

[BFG-9000]

Motherboard RAID has the advantage of being bootable, but the disadvantage is if the motherboard dies you won't be able to recover the array without a replacement motherboard using the same Southbridge/PCH or RAID controller chip. With an add-in card you could simply move the card and all the disks over.

Windows RAID in disk management also allows moving the drives to another computer, but isn't bootable. Just right-click in disk management and select New Striped Volume for RAID0, New Mirrored Volume for RAID1, or New Spanned Volume for JBOD. It's not available in Windows 10 Home Edition.

However since Windows 8 there has been the more powerful option of Storage Spaces, which lets you add and remove disks from a virtual storage pool, including USB sticks and network drives. It even lets you use RAID5, and you can create a volume larger than the space you have (it will prompt you to add disks when the space runs low).

 

[USAFRet]

Or, you could just move things to the other drive. They don't have to be "linked" in any way.

Depending on what is consuming the space of the primary drive, there are several methods to have your data on multiple drives.