how to combine multiple drives of different sizes?

[r3xx3r]

Hey guys,

I have 3 Western Digital hard drives, 2 at 1TB and 1 is 500GB, i was wondering if there is any way to make them 1 logical drive. I have an Asus Sabertooth 990FX Rev1 motherboard. I dont want to use a software based solution, it needs to be outside of the OS. Any ideas? i might just put the 2 1TB is Raid 0 and leave the 500GB separate, but i would like to have all 3 together with 2.5TB available.

[Oshino Shinobu]

There's no way that I know of to add the 500GB to the array. RAID 0 for the 1TB drives will work fine though. 

[L.E.D]

You can raid 0 any number of drives of any size, I've done it.

[xXxYOLOxSWAGxXx_420BlazeIt]

Hey guys,

I have 3 Western Digital hard drives, 2 at 1TB and 1 is 500GB, i was wondering if there is any way to make them 1 logical drive. I have an Asus Sabertooth 990FX Rev1 motherboard. I dont want to use a software based solution, it needs to be outside of the OS. Any ideas? i might just put the 2 1TB is Raid 0 and leave the 500GB separate, but i would like to have all 3 together with 2.5TB available.

Use a spanned volume you can do it on either Windows or Linux. I dont know of any way youre going to be able to do it outside of the OS youre using.

 

You could also look into  using symlinks in linux, or the windows folder mounting thing.

 

A 3TB disk is like £70 on Amazon. Why not just save all the time fucking around and get something more reliable with less noise and energy consumption?

[RichardsD]

Yes, you could just do RAID 0 or Spanned volume.  But please, do not do that.  With SSDs, fine you can do RAID 0.  But I really don't recommend you do that with HDDs, especially three of them.  

[xXxYOLOxSWAGxXx_420BlazeIt]

You can raid 0 any number of drives of any size, I've done it.

He will have less usable space if he RAID0s all of the drives compared to if he just used them as they are.

[xXxYOLOxSWAGxXx_420BlazeIt]

Yes, you could just do RAID 0 or Spanned volume.  But please, do not do that.  With SSDs, fine you can do RAID 0.  But I really don't recommend you do that with HDDs, especially three of them.  

There is nothing wrong with RAID0. It is just recommended that you take backups of truely critical data. I currently have 3 RAID0 volumes in my two main desktops. None have failed in the 3 years they have been running quite intensive workloads.

 

 

 

Using a spanned volume or RAID0 has the exact same probability of failure. There is no parity or redundancy in a spanned volume. How can you recommend one over the other like that? If he put the drives in RAID0 he would have less usable space than putting them in a spanned volume, or using symlinks or the windows binded folder mounts.

[RichardsD]

-

 

Sorry, I may not have worded it the most clearly.  I didn't recommend either, but yes.. as long as the data is backed up could can do it

[r3xx3r]

i would love to buy a new drive but i dont have the money right now. I dont want to use spanned volume or any OS based option cause i am regularly reinstalling my os for various reasons, i ended up just putting my 2 1TB in Raid 0 and i found a 3rd 120GB ssd (didnt realize i had put it in my old external enclosure lol, so i put my 2 128gb and 1 120gb ssds in raid 0, left my main 240gb alone as the os drive and my 500gb alone

[Captain_WD]

Hey guys,

I have 3 Western Digital hard drives, 2 at 1TB and 1 is 500GB, i was wondering if there is any way to make them 1 logical drive. I have an Asus Sabertooth 990FX Rev1 motherboard. I dont want to use a software based solution, it needs to be outside of the OS. Any ideas? i might just put the 2 1TB is Raid 0 and leave the 500GB separate, but i would like to have all 3 together with 2.5TB available.

 

Hey r3xx3r,

 

What are the drives that you have?

As the guys said, you can either go for RAID0 or do a simple JBOD SPAN. You can actually go for any type of RAID that your motherboard supports (even RAID5). The problem would be that the two 1TB drives will each be limited to 500GB because of the third drive and work with the speed of the 500GB drive. That would give you 1.5TB usable space at most.

My suggestion is to go for JBOD SPAN and simply use fully all three drives. Although there is not speed boost or redundancy with JBOD SPAN, your computer will see the drives as one big volume and, in case any of them fails, you can still read the data off the other two (as long as it is not written across two drives).

 

Hope this helps,

 

Captain_WD.