Questions about viewing drives as one in Windows 7

[Mighty_Burger]

New, inexperienced PC builder here. Well, I haven't quite started to build yet because the parts haven't all shipped yet. Before I start, I have a question.

 

I'm starting out with 2 drives, a 240GB SSD and a 1TB HDD.  (Well, an optical drive too, but that doesn't matter in what I'm takling about) I've heard I cannot combine the two without losing a lot of performance, so I won't be asking about that. What I am asking about is future storage upgrades, like buying new hard drives. It would be very inconvinient to have it display as 2 seperate drives (on Windows 7). Is there some method of combining the two to display as one? Will it destroy the current data on it? If they are from different manufacturers and/or have different amounts of storage, can I still do it? Will my current specs allow me to insert more drives, and if so, how many?

 

Here's my specs.

• CPU: Intel core i5-4590 @3.3GHz Quad core
• CPU Cooler: stock
• Motherboard: ASRock H97M Anniversary Micro ATX
• Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB DDR3-1600
• Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 120GB 2.5" SSD + Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM
• Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 960 4GB SuperSC AAAACX 2.0+ (I plan on upgrading in a year or two)
• Case: Cooler Master N200 MicroATX
• Power Supply: Corsair CSM 550W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply
• Optical Drive: Asus DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS DVD/CD Writer
• Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 OEM 64 Bit

Thanks in advance!

[Captain_WD]

~snip~

 

Hey there Welcome to the community!

 

The build generally looks great.

Regarding the storage, forcing the SSD and the HDD to appear as a larger single volume would be a rather bad move as you would risk your data, lose some performance and would downgrade your data management. I would recommend keeping your SSD as a C (boot) drive and the HDD as your D/E drive (depending on if you have your Optical drive as your D or not). 

You have two options for making what you want - a RAID array and a JBOD Span volume:

- RAID would limit the size of the HDD to the one of the SSD (120GB) and would limit the speed of the SSD to the one of the HDD (more than twice). I would definitely advise against this.

- JBOD Span is an option that would make all drives appear in one single volume and not lose speed or capacity, but it will cause problems with booting and installing applications if they happen to be installed between the two drives. 

 

Captain_WD.