HDD question
 

Okay, this is just a yes or no question lol - I'm not totally sure whether this is possible or not.

Okay, let's just say there's a person, who has a 40gb hard drive. It then ends up getting a little bit full. So he buys a 100gb hard drive.

Now, let's say the 40gb drive is DRIVE C, and 100gb is DRIVE E. Now, is there any way at all (in general), to have two hard drives in the computer, under one drive letter?

So the 40gb and 100gb one make DRIVE C - instead of a DRIVE C and DRIVE E?

Thanks guys.

Chris :)

yes

Follow up question to Scott, how? :)

RAID :D

never seen that before.

a RAID controller should be able to do it if you have on in your motherboard, but AFAIK it's not actual RAID (0, 1, 5 etc)? but a function that it can do.
or you could use RAID 0 but you would have only 80GB in total.

plz correct me if wrong :)

anyone know of a 3rd party app that can span a partition over multiple hard drives? i think Vista can do it but not earlier versions.

tell us what you know scott :)

personally i'd clone the 40GB drive and transfer it to the 100GB :)

Yeah, raid but that's not what I was looking for, just in general like as Steve asked, one partition over several drives :)

I'd prefer that too - but don't you need something like Norton Ghost?

@ Scott, PartitionMagic? I've got the full one, so I could .zip it up and upload it (40mb lol it'll take a while). I unfortunately don't have the installer, so I might only have to .zip the contents up...

Chris :)

i did it in the pass in windows manager
step
1.) have computer icon shortcut on desktop
A.) right click-on it then click-on "manage"
B.) go down the listing to you see "Disk Management" click-on it
C.) see the second HDD right click in the gray faded area,

you should get a item to merge both partition as one.

i use to have partition commander from V-com.com that was long ago one can format the partition to NTFC or FAT32. or resize new partition into one HHD so it be like you have 3HD in one real HD.

some say you should use the main bigger size HD as the master and 2nd smaller size as a slave. think it has to do with the page file for the larger HD more to use for program software to use

Had no idea that it was that easy William, thanks for the tip! :)

Re: HDD question
 

Thought it was yes or no :p

To have 2 physical hard disks act as one you would use JBOD (RAID with none of the features...) You'll have to check if your chipset supports it.. I know nForce4 and some newer ATi/AMD chipsets do.

This feature is built into Vista..

Re: Re: HDD question
 

Yeah it is a yes or no lol.

Ah okay. Thanks for the info Scott. Thanks to Steve and others.

Yeah I do think having the biggest HDD as a Master is more consistent...

Chris :)

Doesn't have to be - my biggist drive is the slave drive.

I use it for all my personal data. The smaller drive is used for all my programs

Same here

Why would you need to use the same drive letter for both drives ?
The easiest thing to do is to use separate drive letters for each drive.

Correct me if I'm wrong but if you use the drives in a RAID configuration and something goes wrong with one drive, all the information on both drives will become unreadable. (Because program data is spread across both drives)

Usually I use a small drive as my master, with windows and my main programs installed. This can be quickly re-ghosted if anything goes wrong.

My second large drive is used to store all my videos, images, music and games.
I also backup my files onto DVD-r/w just in case.

In the past if I had a machine with only one drive, I would create a small partition for windows to use. This could be easily restored if anything went wrong.

It depends on the RAID type you use. I don't fully understand it my self, all I know is that I can do it with my motherboard :D


But 1 type of raid will still work even if the second drive goes down.


I have also heard that using RAID it will downsize the biggest drive to match the smallest one on the setup - Don't know if that is true or not.



I wouldn't merge the 2 drives together - it will help keep things seperate if they have different drive letters.

Plus if you fill up the data drive you won't have to worry about it carrying over and filling up your windows drive.

raid 0 is striped and the drives share the data, so if one breaks you have nothing, but this setup is generally for speed.

raid 1 is mirrored, so both drives have the same data, just security really.

not sure what it goes upto but you can have raid 5 or 10 with more hdd's and hot spares that pickup if any drives fail.

for any raid setup the disks should be the same size, or you could add a bigger hdd to an existing raid but it will be downsized.

raid 5 is striping with parity.. this means it will strip acrross drives as raid 0 does but it keep a parity bit so if 1 of 3 drives fail the remaining 2 can rebuild the third one which failed when you put in a new drive. If 2 of the drives failed then you are screwed unless they are at different times. Raid and scsi are the same in terms of scsi 0, 1, 5 and raid 0, 1 ,5. The setup i would do is raid 0 on controller one for the performance but then do raid 1 from the first controller to the second so I would have a backup. Of course that could take many drives but then id get performance and integrity.

And that's what I personally thought... lol.

Chris

This is true with raid 0 but raid 1 and 5 have data integrity. ;) The downfall is raid 1 and 5 are slower in performance than 0.

Mouse has the best, and correct idea, use the small drive for programs and os and large drive for personal stuff. the personal stuff fills more hd space backing up and doing routine maintanance on a smaller drive is much faster. also another good this is most viruses wont start on a secondary drive at a restart.

^ i think the best idea would be to bin the 40gb cause it's probably quite old :)
40gb is way too small unless you don't play any games released in the last few years.

RAID 10 for me, just ordered 4 200GB's
Speed of the double writing will be reduced by the 2 HD's beeing written at at the same time.. 1 drive fails? Got a backup then. Might be a little over the top tho.. :D

Just one more question BTW.

Okay, this is just a "what if/example" question. I've got DRIVE C here, and the new drive that's a whole lot bigger is DRIVE E. Now, if I were to have both drives installed into the PC, and I completely ghosted DRIVE C to DRIVE E, and I turned off the PC and removed DRIVE C, would DRIVE E automatically become the new DRIVE C? If not, how would I assign the bigger HDD to C?

Just curious. Not thinking about doing anything with HDDs yet... in a long time...

Chris

it will boot to it no probs and windows would rename it drive C :)

Ah awesome lol.

'Cause I was wondering if I had ghosted DRIVE C to the new drive, and XP automatically made it a drive other than C, then the whole registry woulda been screwed lol (since you'd have thousands of DRIVE C entries)...

Thanks Stevie.

Chris :)

Isn't ghost really picky about hardware?

in what way?
used it in every type of machine i know without any probs (unless im tryign to image from USB stick, then i have probs with usb drivers).

don't know if you can move windows over to another drive without getting error from the drive it was install onto. then remove the drive it was install into. window will most likely rename the drive to C but your OS may not work reason it was not install into the newer drive but the old one.

i found in the pass its better restall Windows into the new Hard drive then have the old drive added in to the tower tobe formated after it been restall.

keep in mind Microsoft is a bet funny you should call them up let them know you going to restall it into a newer HHD if you using a Keycode for it.

My is OEM virsion i call them up all the time when i had to do that. so they know it not being share with other anti-pirate thing

Just something I heared :p

I heared that if you ghost a drive and then if you don't replace it with the exact same setup it will fail? I'm happy if that hear say is false :)

you can copy windows to a new hdd using GHOST.. It creates a image of the partition. This image can then be moved to the new drive. It is always better for a clean install but ghosting your old hdd will work fine. I have never had hardware issues with it either.

Sounds awsome! Thanks Jckl! :)

JBOD!

(just a bunch of disks)