How to Combine Multiple Hard Drives Into One High Capacity Drive

How to combine Multiple Hard drives into One High Capacity Drive: Keeping all data into a Hard drive is simple. Some time ago 500GB hard drive is enough for to store all our needs.

But today’s World is all about HD and 3D Movies, Gigantic size Games. These all occupy large size on the Hard drive. Laptops come with low capacity Hard drives like 320 and 500 GB. You can get high capacity hard drive in a laptop by paying huge money on it.

In Desktop choice is yours, but some limitations are there in desktops too. Motherboards come with fixed number of SATA ports. Motherboards having more than 4 SATA ports is good to buy. or You can upgrade your Hard drive by combining Multiple drives into One.

Using RAID

Storage is very cheap these days, and buying a new hard drive is always going to be the best way to increase your storage. There are many ways of attaching storage solutions to a PC system.RAID (Redundant array of independent disks) is a storage technology that combines multiple disk drive components into a logical unit. RAID is a good choice when hard drives were more capacious and less expensive.

The standard RAID levels are a basic set of RAID configurations that employ the techniques of striping, mirroring, or parity to computer hard disk drives.

• RAID LEVEL 0: Minimum 2 disks, No redundancy (no mirror, no parity.)
• RAID LEVEL 1: Minimum 2 disks, Excellent redundancy (as blocks are mirrored.)
• RAID LEVEL 5: Minimum 3 disks, Good redundancy (distributed parity.)
• RAID LEVEL 10: Minimum 4 disks, Excellent redundancy (as blocks are mirrored) and Excellent performance.

Drobo is a perfect example of RAID Storage solution. Drobo is a little bit pricey but you completely satisfy after using it. RAID storage enclosures are widely available on amazon, ebay and newegg.

Using Windows Disk Management utility

You can combine two hard drives into one by using Windows built-in utility “Disk Management.”  (It works for two drives)

1. Click the “Start” menu button
2. Go to “Control panel“, and then “System Security.”
3. Click on”Administrative Tools” and then double-click “Computer Management” new window open and click on “Disk Management” in the left panel.
4. Right-click one of the disks to be combined and select the “Create volume” under the “All Tasks” menu.
5. Click the “Next” button and select the “Symbol Volume.”
6. Click the “Next” button and select the second drive to be included in the final combination.
7. Click on the “Next” button to “Format volume” window.
8. Select the “Format this volume as follows:” option.
9. Click the “Next” button to begin the volume creation and formatting process.
10. The process will take some time depending on your Hard drive size.
11. Click the “Finish” button to complete the disk combination.