Does Win 7 have abilities to take 2 hard drives and combine them?

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jordan12

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I have a 3 TB and a 1.5 TB drive. If I put them both in my machine, does the win 7 Disk management tool have a way for me to combine them into one big drive?
 
Don't think you can mix variable size drives,but if you had two the same, you could do a raid 0 (bad idea) or raid 1, or raid 5 if you have 3 or more drives.

At least in windows server 2003 you can, I'm guessing in 7 you can as well. I may be wrong. You can also do a span which will work with different sizes, but it defeats the whole purpose.
 
Yeah, and I am wanting to combine the two different size disks into one. I do not see how this is possible within win 7
 
ryan_975 said:
are you wanting the benefits or striping (i.e. RAID0) or just to have a single access point for the entire capacity of both drives? If it's the latter, it's called a spanned volume, and is possible to do. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772180.aspx But as far as I can tell, you cannot do that with a boot volume.
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Well, I used my 3Tb and my 1.5 TB and it worked. Shows as one big drive.

But what happens is I reformat my machine? Will windows see it after I am done installing?

Or will I loose that spanned volume of data?
 
jordan12 said:
Yeah, and I am wanting to combine the two different size disks into one. I do not see how this is possible within win 7
Click to expand...
If it's not a boot volume, you can do it in software, in disk management (span).

If it's a boot volume, it will have to be done in a RAID controller (JBOD/SPAN) prior to OS being installed.
 
jordan12 said:
Well, I used my 3Tb and my 1.5 TB and it worked. Shows as one big drive.

But what happens is I reformat my machine? Will windows see it after I am done installing?

Or will I loose that spanned volume of data?
Click to expand...

If you do a new install, you will have to import both of the disks, then you will see everything.
 
I've heard you get better performance to use your built in raid over windows' disk spanning method.
 
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