Setting up JBOD?

PaulC1 · December 25, 2013

Hi all,

So I'm buying a new 1TB Hard Drive as my current one is almost full, but when I install the new one I would like to just merge the two so windows sees it as one, simple as that, I'm not interested in any RAID or anything, there's nothing important enough on my current drive to care about any protection. With that in mind I was researching to see which would be the best way to let Windows see the two drives as one and it seems JBOD is the way to go, but I have no idea how to set it up. So what would be the easiest way to go about doing this? Do I need any additional software or can I do it straight from Windows? Obviously I would like to spend no money while doing this, so a way to do this for free would be good.

Thanks,

Paul.

lutzee · December 26, 2013

Okay... theres a few missing details here

What other drive are you trying to set this up with, the drive your OS is on? Another data drive?

You'll want to be using a logical volume manager(windows is called logical disk manager), which is a method of defining partitions on a drive. As far as I know you can't add a partition into a LVM array to be merged with another without reformatting the partition.

I may be wrong but this is how I recall.

Personally, I wouldn't bother trying to merge them, I like having separate drives for different stuff, keeps things tidier if one sticks to it.

PaulC1 · December 26, 2013

Okay... theres a few missing details here

What other drive are you trying to set this up with, the drive your OS is on? Another data drive?

You'll want to be using a logical volume manager(windows is called logical disk manager), which is a method of defining partitions on a drive. As far as I know you can't add a partition into a LVM array to be merged with another without reformatting the partition.

I may be wrong but this is how I recall.

Personally, I wouldn't bother trying to merge them, I like having separate drives for different stuff, keeps things tidier if one sticks to it.

I'll be trying to merge this with my OS drive and if it requires re formatting then I'll just leave it, but I just wanted both of them to be seen as the same drive as I didn't want to go through all the sorting process, then I forget which is on which drive etc