Can you make 2 hard drives appear as one

tisoy · 01-20-2006, 01:35 AM

Is it possible to have 2 hard drives (one of which includes windows xp) to be seen as one big hard drive.

Kilojim · 01-20-2006, 01:54 PM

I don't think that it is possible to do this i'm afraid, however I might be wrong.

I have seen these computers with multiple drives and I was just wondering what the point of them is. Thanks.

**Lyte** · 01-20-2006, 10:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tisoy

Is it possible to have 2 hard drives (one of which includes windows xp) to be seen as one big hard drive.

Maybe I'm dense but... what do you mean by "seen"?

You can have multple drives on a computer. In fact, I'm going to add my old hard drive to my current computer. I'll have two hard drives, one for games and the other for business.

Lyte

dumpedcore · 03-01-2006, 11:25 AM

I have 100 GB HDD. It consists of 80GB Barracuda and 20 GB old one. I use both of them in perfect conjunction and the old one acts as my testing rat. I do all sort of experiments on it. :P

GoPC · 03-23-2006, 04:01 PM

Look up "Raid Array" and you'll see that multiple hard drives being mirrored has been a common practice for a LOOOONG time.

You do this to secure your data in the event of a HDD failure.

Basically, the RAID controller divides the input signal by the number of drives you have on the array... 2 disk, 4 disk...whatever. When you write or change data, ALL the drives write or change. They work simultaneously making as many carbon copies of the data as you have drives on the array.

Raid Controllers are fairly inespensive if memory serves and that was a few years ago. I'm sure there are MANY competing products on the market by now and that always drives the price down too.

I use on on my office machine... it's a 4 disk array and never once has a HDD hardware crash cost me a single bit of data.

In a Raid Array, you don't have different disks to access though... just to clerify, the drive is ONE drive being mirrored by the array. So your machine only sees ONE drive but your array sofware manager sees the status of them all.

Make sense?

GoPC

firestorm · 03-23-2006, 10:06 PM

There are different RAID levels, 0 and as high as 5. I think Raid was invented by MIT grads just for fun lol. I have 2 hd's on my comp and 3 on my dads. One for pics, one for games and programming stuff, 2 for linux and then the normal XP with all it's stuff on it.

McDaddy · 03-24-2006, 12:52 AM

the answer to your question is no you can not make t hard drives in t o one big one. you can however devide up your files between the two. i have mutiple hard drives. one is my primary,and the other one is where is store back up files, for when i re-formatt, i dont have to redownload as many programs, back up my music, etc.

there are many purposes for muti[le hard drives. the most common is back up incase your primary hard drive fails, or just extra storage.

VAIO · 03-24-2006, 05:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by McDaddy

the answer to your question is no you can not make t hard drives in t o one big one. you can however devide up your files between the two. i have mutiple hard drives. one is my primary,and the other one is where is store back up files, for when i re-formatt, i dont have to redownload as many programs, back up my music, etc.

there are many purposes for muti[le hard drives. the most common is back up incase your primary hard drive fails, or just extra storage.

Somebody didn't get GoPC's memo. Some RAID types allow more than one hard drive to be seen by the operating system as one big drive. This distributes the data evenly among all of the drives and improves performance. However, if one of the drives goes out, then all your data is lost. Other RAID types mirror the data from one drive onto another drive, making an exact copy of your data in case one drive goes out.

RAID array

McDaddy · 03-24-2006, 10:13 PM

ill have to look into raid set ups. i dont know much about them

Money25 · 03-29-2006, 12:47 AM

Taken from www.webopedia.com

From what I know the most popular varieties are RAID 0,RAID 1, and RAID 5. Both HDD have to be equal in size. I am not sure if buffer size matters or not though.

"(rād) Short for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks, a category of disk drives that employ two or more drives in combination for fault tolerance and performance. RAID disk drives are used frequently on servers but aren't generally necessary for personal computers.
There are number of different RAID levels:

Level 0 -- Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost.
Level 1 -- Mirroring and Duplexing: Provides disk mirroring. Level 1 provides twice the read transaction rate of single disks and the same write transaction rate as single disks.
Level 2 -- Error-Correcting Coding: Not a typical implementation and rarely used, Level 2 stripes data at the bit level rather than the block level.
Level 3 -- Bit-Interleaved Parity: Provides byte-level striping with a dedicated parity disk. Level 3, which cannot service simultaneous multiple requests, also is rarely used.
Level 4 -- Dedicated Parity Drive: A commonly used implementation of RAID, Level 4 provides block-level striping (like Level 0) with a parity disk. If a data disk fails, the parity data is used to create a replacement disk. A disadvantage to Level 4 is that the parity disk can create write bottlenecks.
Level 5 -- Block Interleaved Distributed Parity: Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance. Level 5 is one of the most popular implementations of RAID.
Level 6 -- Independent Data Disks with Double Parity: Provides block-level striping with parity data distributed across all disks.
Level 0+1 – A Mirror of Stripes: Not one of the original RAID levels, two RAID 0 stripes are created, and a RAID 1 mirror is created over them. Used for both replicating and sharing data among disks.
Level 10 – A Stripe of Mirrors: Not one of the original RAID levels, multiple RAID 1 mirrors are created, and a RAID 0 stripe is created over these.
Level 7: A trademark of Storage Computer Corporation that adds caching to Levels 3 or 4.
RAID S: EMC Corporation's proprietary striped parity RAID system used in its Symmetrix storage systems. "

aleeonline · 04-17-2006, 01:33 PM

thnx for the info money25
hope it helps ..