How to merge 2 hard drives into one!?

[abillybob]

Hey Guys

 

So I have a new server with 2x 2TB Hard Drives. I need to create 1 volume from 2 drives therefore windows see's it as 1 Volume and 4TB of storage. Is this possible? Bearing in mind I need the server OS to sit on the same drive I'm doing this too?

 

Thanks

[bald_pig]

RAID 0

[TriggerHappyUK]

Yeah... RAID 0

 

But you'd have no redundancy or fault tolerance

[abillybob]

Yeah... RAID 0

 

But you'd have no redundancy or fault tolerance

 

Ok cheers I'll have a 3TB external hard drive for backups as well so I think I'll be ok!

[Steve21]

Ok cheers I'll have a 3TB external hard drive for backups as well so I think I'll be ok!

 

I have to ask, why? Never seen anyone use RAID 0 for anything that would run a server on with important stuff.

 

Steve

[abillybob]

I have to ask, why? Never seen anyone use RAID 0 for anything that would run a server on with important stuff.

 

Steve

 

It's just for a home server. I have all my media files but they're 2.4TB. I want them on 1 shared area and for Plex to read them easily. But I'm guessing as I have an external Hard Drive and doing a Bare Metal Recovery to the External HDD that should cover me if the internal HDD's fail?

[Steve21]

Ah yeah should work fine then, would need to manually reinstall windows as you said, but yeah

 

Alternative is a few cheap drives and raid it up if you didn't want to restore etc

 

Steve

[matt40k]

It's important to note that RAID-0 isn't recommended for servers - you'll get good IO, but if one of the disc goes, you've lost your data, not half, all the data. So when you write a file, it'll write "half" to one disc and the other "half" to the other disc. You also don't normally have the OS on the same drive as your data. So very strange. If you have 3TB of data, and you want it on one "drive" you could "mount" the second drive in a folder within the first drive. I believe you could partition the each disc in two, then software raid-1 the os "drive" then have a simple drive on other partition, with one mounted to a folder within the other, so you have say C: OS raid-1 with 0.5TB, then d: with 1.5TB then d:\folder with another 1.5TB - that'll be safer then a raid-0 drive. Still buying 2 more hdd and raid-10 would be correct solution.

[sted]

might be better looking at storage spaces if its 2012 server rather than raid (not if its the boot drive) as its software and dosent rely on any particular raid card

[abillybob]

might be better looking at storage spaces if its 2012 server rather than raid (not if its the boot drive) as its software and dosent rely on any particular raid card

 

It's the boot drive unfortunately so I don't think I'd be able to do this

 

Edit: This may sound stupid but how do you setup a RAID I get why they're so important and I have RAID 1's across my servers but I never set them up. Is it something you set in the BIOS!? I have checked apparently my new server does support RAID 0 but I wouldn't have a clue how to set them up!?

Edited November 27, 2015 by abillybob

[sted]

depends on the raid controller on dell servers you boot from lifecycle controller and do what it says for instance. pcs there probably software in windows but if its the boot drive then bios/raid controllers bios

[mjs_mjs]

Another way to do it would be to create a volume on disk 1 for OS of say 60GB, then another spanned volume across the remaining disks, which is effectively raid 0.

 

if you're on 2012, you might even be able to do the whole thing without rebuilding. You can create a new volume on the second disk, move things like movies to it then shrink the C drive (conditions apply). there's some stuff here on it https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc772180.aspx - but in disk manager there's GUI's for all of this.

[abillybob]

So got the device last night. Specifically it's an Acer Revo One RL85.

I went into BIOS and found the SATA Mode which was set to AHCI wanted to change this to RAID so I could launch the RAID controller but there's no option to change the SATA Mode to RAID only AHCI is an option. AM I doing something wrong here? In this review until: Acer Revo One RL85: A pint-sized PC for the snug • The Register it does state that their setup came with RAID 1 so surely mine must be able to do it!?

 

I've been racking my head about this all night so hopefully one of you guru's could give me a hand!

[localzuk]

I would recommend doing this slightly differently. Instead of using RAID 0, I would advise setting the 2 disks up as normal disks, but instead of mounting the second disk as a drive letter, mount it as a folder in your existing disk's structure. So, whilst you won't get a single contiguous area to work with, you gain redundancy and the ability to create a single share containing that mount point as a sub-directory.

[abillybob]

I would recommend doing this slightly differently. Instead of using RAID 0, I would advise setting the 2 disks up as normal disks, but instead of mounting the second disk as a drive letter, mount it as a folder in your existing disk's structure. So, whilst you won't get a single contiguous area to work with, you gain redundancy and the ability to create a single share containing that mount point as a sub-directory.

 

I'd prefer RAID 0 though because doesn't that mean it doubles the speed when reading and writing top the drives? The redundancy side of things doesn't bother me too much as I'll have a daily backup on a external HDD which will be bare metal recovery.

[bald_pig]

Likely that it was software RAID, doubt that would have a dedicated controller, you can do it in disk management.