Help with Raid

[DARBADARBZ]

I want to combine my SATA drives into one drive. I have different drives, with different capacity, speed, and some are solid state or mechanical. They are all SATA, but some SSD, some 5600 RPM, some 7200 RPM, from 4GB to terabytes of capacity. I might get others that are different specs.

 

I don't care about redundancy. This is mass storage for games and shit. But I want to be able to use the all the space and speed of all the drives as a single D: drive or whatever. My PC case supports 24 drives, but the raid should never have more than 20 drives max. What controller do I need? How do set up? I'm a very beginner with Raid but id love to learn and set this up.

[DARBADARBZ]

36 minutes ago, oofki said:

It doesn’t work like that for raid, you need the same or similar sized / speed drives. 

Is there something else I can do then for the same result I want?

[Electronics Wizardy]

What os are you using?

Storage spaces in windows allows you to mix drives of mixes sizes into one big volume, with support for caching. It works reasonbly well if you know the quirks.

[Blue4130]

13 hours ago, DARBADARBZ said:

I want to combine my SATA drives into one drive. I have different drives, with different capacity, speed, and some are solid state or mechanical. They are all SATA, but some SSD, some 5600 RPM, some 7200 RPM, from 4GB to terabytes of capacity. I might get others that are different specs.

 

I don't care about redundancy. This is mass storage for games and shit. But I want to be able to use the all the space and speed of all the drives as a single D: drive or whatever. My PC case supports 24 drives, but the raid should never have more than 20 drives max. What controller do I need? How do set up? I'm a very beginner with Raid but id love to learn and set this up.

4gb? With the age of that, don't bother. Any harddrive smaller than 500gb I'd not bother with. (and realistically I wouldn't even use that)

[DARBADARBZ]

15 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What os are you using?

Storage spaces in windows allows you to mix drives of mixes sizes into one big volume, with support for caching. It works reasonbly well if you know the quirks.

Windows 11 home

[DARBADARBZ]

3 hours ago, Blue4130 said:

4gb? With the age of that, don't bother. Any harddrive smaller than 500gb I'd not bother with. (and realistically I wouldn't even use that)

It's a quantum fireball and it sounds so cool when it spins up though

[thevictor390]

It's really easy in Windows.

 

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-create-one-large-volume-using-multiple-hard-drives-windows-10#:~:text=How to Combine Two Hard Drives 1 Use,hard drives you want to combine. See More.

 

That said, I would make small groups instead of combining all of them. Otherwise you lose the whole thing when one drive fails.

[Blue4130]

3 hours ago, DARBADARBZ said:

It's a quantum fireball and it sounds so cool when it spins up though

What's more important? A cool sound or your data?

[LIGISTX]

On 6/21/2023 at 5:40 PM, DARBADARBZ said:

I want to combine my SATA drives into one drive. I have different drives, with different capacity, speed, and some are solid state or mechanical. They are all SATA, but some SSD, some 5600 RPM, some 7200 RPM, from 4GB to terabytes of capacity. I might get others that are different specs.

 

I don't care about redundancy. This is mass storage for games and shit. But I want to be able to use the all the space and speed of all the drives as a single D: drive or whatever. My PC case supports 24 drives, but the raid should never have more than 20 drives max. What controller do I need? How do set up? I'm a very beginner with Raid but id love to learn and set this up.

But…. Why? Don’t mix totally random drives and SSD’s together. Some stuff will load fast, some stuff will load slow, you won’t be able to control which is which, and it’ll all just be, well, really weird. 
 

Id combine all your harddrives and all your SSD’s into their own 2 separate drives in windows storage spaces. 

[Sarra]

Having done stuff like this in the past, I can say with confidence that it's awesome, for a few days. Then, it's not fun anymore.

 

Group your largest SSDs, make a big raid 0,throw games on it.

 

Put everything else in a massive extended partition, and add leftover space from SSDs, and run it until it breaks. Then, have fun rebuilding it minus whatever drives died.