Two External Drives Into One

[Makaveli]

Hello everyone, it's been a while!

 

Here is my dilemma: I've had a WD 1TB MyBook external hard drive for a year now. The drive is now full with my families media collection so we bought another drive - a Seagate 1TB external drive. Now what I want to do is have it so that when I click a folder and open it, I will have the full 2TB of space. It would make sense if I could format the two external drives into one big 2TB partition but I haven't found a way to do. The deal breaker is that I cannot delete the data on the full WD drive. Basically I'm trying to get the computer to believe the two external drives are actually 1 external drive that is 2TB total. Does this make sense? Does anyone know how to do this?

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Nick

[IVIYTH0S]

why not just get a 2TB external, move the info to that and then sell the two 1TB?

That'd be the only cost effective way to do it, the other method I'd mention would probably cost more.

[TheHippi]

You would have to put it into RAID-0. But doing that would erase everything on both drives so

[IVIYTH0S]

Adding to my previous suggestion, it'd be even cheaper to buy a 2TB internal drive and run it in an external enclosure :thumbs-up:

[wevsspot]

Would have to agree with Ivi on this one. The simplest way to accomplish this is to go with a 2tb drive in an external enclosure.

 

You certainly don't want to do a RAID0 as suggested by another poster - you wouldn't have any fault tolerance and this is probably priceless data that you wouldn't want to lose.

 

The biggest challenge is backing up your current 1tb of data - otherwise you could span two or more disks using either JBOD or RAID+redundancy (i.e. RAID1, RAID5 or RAID10).

 

Which brings us to the next issue..... JBOD is the only scenario where you could take the two existing 1tb drives and span them so Windows recognizes them as a single logical drive. For RAID1 you would need 2X2tb drives, RAID5 you would need 3x2tb drives and RAID10 4 or more 2tb drives.

 

So to wrap a rather long winded response (i apologize) - Ivi has the simplest most cost effective solution. Pick up a single 2tb drive and an external enclosure and sell the two existing 1tb drives.

 

Good luck.

[sdy284]

can't Windows Home Server do this?

[Nemo]

can't Windows Home Server do this?

That would have been my suggestion although I believe it would use part of the free space for backup purposes.

[Makaveli]

What I ended up doing was actually creating shortcuts to all the files and housing all of the shortcuts in a folder on my laptop's internal drive. I had to do a little bit of registry altering to get rid of the "- shortcut" text from each file but now that that is gone, it works wonderfully! Thanks to all the suggestions.

[wevsspot]

That's a slick work around Glad you found a solution that fits your needs.

 

Cheers.

[cirro]

this is why i like tape backup for things to important to delete 400gb-UN/800gb-compressed $45.(the tape not the drive, i wish haha)

 

moderm LTO drives are like 80mb/s its not that oldschool.. to me at least

Edited February 2, 2010 by cirro

[itsernst]

Also, redundancy may be your biggest need in this case as well. If this has your photos, documents, etc. on it i would trust it to (1) 2TB drive. RAID is a must on data for me personally.