How to use windows 10’s storage spaces to mirror and combine drives
When you have multiple drives connected to a single system, you can take advantage of a feature called ‘Storage Spaces’ in order to combine those drives together or mirror each one of them. The utility basically allows you to create a virtual ‘storage pool’ of your combined drives so that you can manage all of them from a single spot. Furthermore, the feature can be used for backup purposes as you can set it up so that your drives are protected from failures.
Simple uses of Storage Spaces
In truth, the average user has little to no need of the Storage Spaces feature. Combining multiple drives into a single (virtual) folder may sound enticing but the trouble is not always worth it. With that said, there are some cases where Storage Spaces is absolutely the most convenient solution. For example, when you set up a home media server, having all of your available drives connected into a single folder will let you manage your movies, songs, and whatever else you have on the server much more easily.
Furthermore, storage spaces are very flexible due to the simple fact that you can always make them bigger than your currently available physical space. So if you have two drives which offer 240GB of physical storage space combined, you can still create a storage pool of say, 800GB. Because when your storage pool fills up to 200GB, the feature will ask you to connect additional drives which will work instantly without any further configuration from your part.
When you just want to combine your drives in order to manage them more efficiently, all you need to start a storage pool is a single additional drive, other than the system one you use for Windows. Such storage pools are vulnerable to data loss should one of the drives fail but they use no space for backups so you can maximize their capacities.
Storage Spaces and data security
As I mentioned before, utility is not the only purpose of Storage Spaces. In fact, the feature supports several resiliency types which can be used to protect your data in case one or more of your connected drives fail. Different resiliency types require different numbers of drives so here is a look at the available options:
- None: This is what I was talking about in the previous section. The so-called simple spaces can be started with a single additional drive but they do not protect against drive failure as no data is backed up. The best option for those who do simply want to maximize storage efficiency.
- Two-way mirror: As the name implies, this layout stores two copies of your data and as such requires at least two drives. This will protect you against a single drive’s failure as both of them will hold the exact same data.
- Three-way mirror: Same as above with the only difference being that your data needs to be copied amongst at least three drives.
- Parity: Layouts that attempt to combine storage efficiency and data protection. Parity spaces require at least three drives in order to protect you against a single driver’s failure. This layout is best used for archiving data and storing files that you do not access frequently or at least do not overwrite often.
Setting up Storage Spaces
At this point you should have some understanding of how storage spaces work, especially in regards to resiliency types. We will now move from the theoretical aspects of Storage Spaces and delve into the practical bits as we set up our own storage pool.
- Start by connecting all of your available drives to your computer.
- Open your Start menu, type Storage Spaces and press Enter.
- The window that opens will soon be filled with information about your storage pool and the drives inside it but since this is the first time you are using the feature, the only thing you will see in there is a link that reads “Create a new pool and storage space” so click on it to continue.
- The next section will show you a list of available drives which you can use to create a storage pool. Select the ones you want and click on the “Create pool” button. Do note that all data will be erased from the drives so create backups if you need to keep anything.
Now that you have chosen the initial pool of drives, it is time to create a storage space. The next menu will let you configure everything about the storage space, including its name, drive letter, resiliency type, and capacity.
Choose anything you want for the name and drive letter and choose the resiliency type based on what we have already said. As for the logical size, it is generally a good idea to create a storage space that is much higher than the actual physical capacity of the drives you have currently connected to your systems as you can always add more in the future. Once everything has been properly configured, click on the “Create storage space” button.
Using and managing Storage Spaces
Open Windows/File Explorer and you will see your newly created storage pool appear like a perfectly normal drive. Windows makes almost no distinction between virtual and physical drives so you can use it in any way you want. You can even enable BitLocker and encrypt the drive in case you are planning to store sensitive information in it.
The important thing to know about Storage Spaces is that you have to manage them from their very own utility and not through any other tool in Windows. The utility provides options to create additional storage spaces, add and remove drives, and generally perform any action related to storage pools. The only thing worth noting here is that when you remove a drive from your storage pool, you need to re-format it, otherwise it will not even appear in File Explorer.
To do that, open Disk Management, right-click on the affected drive and select to create a “New Simple Volume”. Follow the steps on the screen and you will be able to format the drive in no time.
That is about all you need to know for Storage Spaces. If you run into any issues before or after creating a storage pool and a storage space, feel free to drop a comment down below and we will get back to you as soon as possible!
“Storage Spaces” is a new feature in Windows 8 and Windows 10 that can combine multiple hard drives into a single virtual drive. It can mirror data across multiple drives for redundancy or combine multiple physical drives into a single pool of storage.
You can even create pools of storage larger than the amount of physical storage space you have available. When the physical storage fills up, you can plug in another drive and take advantage of it with no additional configuration required. Storage Spaces is similar to RAID or LVM on Linux.
Creating a Storage Space
To create a storage space, you’ll have to connect two or more additional drives to your computer – you can’t use your system drive for this. The drives can be either internal or external drives.
You can open the Storage Spaces configuration window from the Control Panel or by bringing up the Start screen with the Windows key, typing “Storage Spaces,” clicking the Settings category and selecting the Storage Spaces shortcut. If you’re using Windows 10 you have to search using the Start Menu instead.
If you haven’t set up a storage space yet, you’ll only see a link to create a new storage space. Once you’ve set up a storage space, information about your system’s storage spaces will appear here.
Select the drives you want to use for the storage space and click the “Create pool” button to continue. You’ll lose any files that are already on the drive – copy any important files off the drives before pooling them. You can add additional drives later.
After selecting the drives to pool, you’ll have to configure your new storage space. The name and drive letter are self-explanatory – the storage space will appear as the drive letter you specify here.
Windows will tell you the maximum physical capacity of your pooled drives, but you can specify an arbitrarily large logical size. For example, you could pool two 20GB drives and select a combined size of 500GB. The storage space will appear to Windows and other programs as a drive that has 500GB of available storage. When the drive begins to fill up and nears the 40GB physical limit, Windows will display a notification in the Action Center, prompting you to add additional physical storage space.
The resiliency type controls how Windows handles your data. There are four options:
- None: Windows will store only a single copy of your data. You’ll lose the data if one of your drives fails, but no space will be used on backups.
- Two-way mirror: Windows will store two copies of your data. If one of your drives fails, you won’t lose your data. This requires at least two drives.
- Three-way mirror: Windows will store three copies of your data. If one or two of your drives fails, you won’t lose your data. This requires at least three drives.
- Parity: Windows stores parity information with the data, protecting you from a single drive failure. Parity uses drive space more efficiently than mirroring, but file access times are slower. Parity is ideal for drives with large, infrequently updated files, such as video files.
After you’ve entered your settings, click the “Create storage space” button and Windows will create and format the storage space.
Using a Storage Space
Your new storage space will appear in Windows Explorer as a normal drive with a single drive letter. The storage space appears no different from a normal, physical drive to Windows and the programs you use.
You can do anything you’d do with a normal drive with the storage. You can even enableBitLocker drive encryption for it.
Managing Storage Spaces
After creating a storage space, you can revisit the Storage Spaces control panel to view information about your storage spaces. From this window, you can view the available space in your storage pool, add additional drives, and create new storage spaces.
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With the Windows Storage Spaces tool, you can pair your hard drives together to consolidate data and add redundancies to all your drives. Here’s how to get started.
I have built up a rather large collection of movies and TV shows that I’ve ripped from Blu-ray discs. Every few years, I find I need a bigger hard drive to hold them all, and with the introduction of 4K Blu-ray, even my multi-terabyte drive is bursting at the seams. If only there was a better way to organize and consolidate all these files. Enter Windows’ Storage Spaces.
How Storage Spaces Work
The Storage Spaces feature aims to help with situations like mine: instead of spreading your files across multiple drives in a disorganized fashion, you can combine multiple hard drives into a pool that Windows sees as one unified volume—with one drive letter.
Storage Spaces also allow you to add redundancy: if one drive fails, you can pop in a new one and rebuild your storage space without losing any data. (This is similar to a backup, but it’s not the same, and you should still have a remote, versioned backup in addition to redundancy if your data is truly important.)
If you’ve heard of RAID, Storage Spaces is similar, only it’s performed entirely in software—no need for an extra hardware RAID card. The performance of your storage space won’t be as fast as it would be with a RAID card, but it’s significantly cheaper and easier to implement when you’re just getting started with these types of pooling technologies.
How to Create a Storage Space
To create a storage space in Windows, open the Start menu, type “storage spaces,” and choose the Manage Storage Spaces tool. After opening the Control Panel, click Create a New Pool and Storage Space and Windows will present you with a list of drives attached to your computer.
They won’t have their drive letters listed, so click the View Files button to make extra sure you’re selecting the disks you want. Any drive you use with Storage Spaces will be erased, so you definitely don’t want to choose the wrong one!
Create a storage pool
When you’re ready, click Create Pool. If you run into any errors, you may need to close programs, or even clean the disk from the command line before continuing.
You have a few options when setting up a new pool. A Simple pool will combine the drives into one storage volume, with no redundancy. I generally don’t recommend this method unless you have a robust backup system in place—in a simple pool, one failed drive will mean losing all your data in the pool.
Two-Way Mirror and Three-Way Mirror require more drives for the same amount of usable space. A two-way mirror requires at least two drives, and a three-way mirror requires five.
However, they also introduce redundancy: your data is stored on multiple drives at a time, so if one drive fails, your data is still intact, and you can pop a new drive in without skipping a beat. (In the case of Three-Way Mirror, you can lose two drives at once without losing any data.)
Create a storage space
Parity is sort of a compromise between the above options. You get more usable space than you would from the same number of mirrored drives, but you still get redundancy thanks to parity bits—tiny pieces of data that help rebuild information if one drive goes dead.
(Parity is a somewhat complex concept, but this video is a pretty decent beginner explanation of how it works, if you’re interested.) The downside is that parity is much slower, so it isn’t ideal for data you actively use often.
Since I’m just using this for basic storage and media, and I’m somewhat limited in the number of drives I have available, I’m going with Parity. With three 8TB drives in Parity mode, I get about 14.5TB of usable space, which is enough for my current needs. But if you need faster storage, you may want a mirror instead, since it’ll be quicker to write data (and quicker to rebuild if a drive fails).
Note that certain earlier versions of Windows offered the option for a ReFS storage space, but this was removed from consumer versions of Windows 10. If you have Windows 10 Enterprise or Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, you can use Microsoft’s newer resilient file system.
When you’re ready, click Create Storage Space—that’s all it takes. Your new volume should be immediately accessible, and you can start copying data to it.
How to Add a New Drive to Your Storage Space
For now, you’re all done—you can use your computer as normal. If there comes a day where you run low on space again and want to add even more storage to your pool, Storage Spaces makes it easy.
Manage storage spaces
Head back to the Manage Storage Spaces page and click the Change Settings button. Then, next to your current pool, click the Add Drives button.
Select your drive (again, it will be erased, so back it up first!) and make sure the Optimize Drive Usage box is checked—this will move some of your data to the new drive so it’s spread across all your drives optimally.
Click the Add Drives button, and once Windows is finished moving that data, you’ll have even more space to work with.
There’s a lot more to Storage Spaces than what we’ve covered here, so when you’re ready to get more advanced with it, be sure to search around to see the extra features you can enable through PowerShell. For now, enjoy your much larger pool of drives!
With the Windows Storage Spaces tool, you can pair your hard drives together to consolidate data and add redundancies to all your drives. Here’s how to get started.
I have built up a rather large collection of movies and TV shows that I’ve ripped from Blu-ray discs. Every few years, I find I need a bigger hard drive to hold them all, and with the introduction of 4K Blu-ray, even my multi-terabyte drive is bursting at the seams. If only there was a better way to organize and consolidate all these files. Enter Windows’ Storage Spaces.
How Storage Spaces Work
The Storage Spaces feature aims to help with situations like mine: instead of spreading your files across multiple drives in a disorganized fashion, you can combine multiple hard drives into a pool that Windows sees as one unified volume—with one drive letter.
Storage Spaces also allow you to add redundancy: if one drive fails, you can pop in a new one and rebuild your storage space without losing any data. (This is similar to a backup, but it’s not the same, and you should still have a remote, versioned backup in addition to redundancy if your data is truly important.)
If you’ve heard of RAID, Storage Spaces is similar, only it’s performed entirely in software—no need for an extra hardware RAID card. The performance of your storage space won’t be as fast as it would be with a RAID card, but it’s significantly cheaper and easier to implement when you’re just getting started with these types of pooling technologies.
How to Create a Storage Space
To create a storage space in Windows, open the Start menu, type “storage spaces,” and choose the Manage Storage Spaces tool. After opening the Control Panel, click Create a New Pool and Storage Space and Windows will present you with a list of drives attached to your computer.
They won’t have their drive letters listed, so click the View Files button to make extra sure you’re selecting the disks you want. Any drive you use with Storage Spaces will be erased, so you definitely don’t want to choose the wrong one!
Create a storage pool
When you’re ready, click Create Pool. If you run into any errors, you may need to close programs, or even clean the disk from the command line before continuing.
You have a few options when setting up a new pool. A Simple pool will combine the drives into one storage volume, with no redundancy. I generally don’t recommend this method unless you have a robust backup system in place—in a simple pool, one failed drive will mean losing all your data in the pool.
Two-Way Mirror and Three-Way Mirror require more drives for the same amount of usable space. A two-way mirror requires at least two drives, and a three-way mirror requires five.
However, they also introduce redundancy: your data is stored on multiple drives at a time, so if one drive fails, your data is still intact, and you can pop a new drive in without skipping a beat. (In the case of Three-Way Mirror, you can lose two drives at once without losing any data.)
Create a storage space
Parity is sort of a compromise between the above options. You get more usable space than you would from the same number of mirrored drives, but you still get redundancy thanks to parity bits—tiny pieces of data that help rebuild information if one drive goes dead.
(Parity is a somewhat complex concept, but this video is a pretty decent beginner explanation of how it works, if you’re interested.) The downside is that parity is much slower, so it isn’t ideal for data you actively use often.
Since I’m just using this for basic storage and media, and I’m somewhat limited in the number of drives I have available, I’m going with Parity. With three 8TB drives in Parity mode, I get about 14.5TB of usable space, which is enough for my current needs. But if you need faster storage, you may want a mirror instead, since it’ll be quicker to write data (and quicker to rebuild if a drive fails).
Note that certain earlier versions of Windows offered the option for a ReFS storage space, but this was removed from consumer versions of Windows 10. If you have Windows 10 Enterprise or Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, you can use Microsoft’s newer resilient file system.
When you’re ready, click Create Storage Space—that’s all it takes. Your new volume should be immediately accessible, and you can start copying data to it.
How to Add a New Drive to Your Storage Space
For now, you’re all done—you can use your computer as normal. If there comes a day where you run low on space again and want to add even more storage to your pool, Storage Spaces makes it easy.
Manage storage spaces
Head back to the Manage Storage Spaces page and click the Change Settings button. Then, next to your current pool, click the Add Drives button.
Select your drive (again, it will be erased, so back it up first!) and make sure the Optimize Drive Usage box is checked—this will move some of your data to the new drive so it’s spread across all your drives optimally.
Click the Add Drives button, and once Windows is finished moving that data, you’ll have even more space to work with.
There’s a lot more to Storage Spaces than what we’ve covered here, so when you’re ready to get more advanced with it, be sure to search around to see the extra features you can enable through PowerShell. For now, enjoy your much larger pool of drives!
Okay so i was bounced around by telephone support this morning for over an hour and i figure the community will give me better answers so here is the scenario:
I have a win 10 machine acting as a server (it is a server but MS accounts for onedrive doesnt work on server ’12 so i have to use win 10, don’t ask its irrelevant)
on this windows 10 box i have a few storage spaces, all two way mirror (25 tb logical, 50 TB actual). so what i want to do here is break one of the 4tb pools and use the drive i remove to copy the data off to; then remove the storage space entirely. since its a two way mirror, i’ve been able to take the drive off and the data integrity remains in place, it just warns me that a drive has failed and to replace it. So on to my issue:
When i remove the drive, i then have a 4tb drive that i want to copy the the storage space data to. every time i remove the drive and plug it back in, windows does what it should and reconnects it to the storage space. i think its because the disc is dynamic to be used in the storage space and my question really is A) can i just change it back to a regular disk then copy my data off – removing the storage space completely or B) will that cause all my data to be deleted before i can back it up?
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Thanks but i figured it out already.
For those looking, pull one of the two drives, then i used another computer (laptop) running win 10 as well. this can be done at a friends house or something too. When you plug in that drive to another computer you will see the storage pool come up. just delete the pool and the data on that drive. when you take if back to you original computer, it will assign a drive letter and you can manage it from there/ copy out the pool data still left on the second half of the mirror. For me that was around 3.75 TB, so the transfer took a little while, but once it was completed i removed the storage space and reformatted the drive, freeing up another 4 tb hard drive.
now i didn’t want to do all of that cause my one drive was failing and i could have just plugged in a new 4tb, be done with it. but once i couldn’t easily figure out this solution i drilled into it – its what i do. needless to say i found my bad drive and had it destroyed, bought two 8 TB drives to mirror ( why not upgrade) and transferred the data from my remaining 4tb to the 8 tb pool. i then broke the case of the 4tb, connected it through sata internally and used diskpart in admin command line to erase the USB board encryption.
still extremely silly Microsoft doesn’t have a KB of this as an user manual. surprised; i am not.
Windows 8 has another astonishing feature; it is capable of combining multiple hard drives into a single virtual drive. Your data can be copied on multiple drives in order to keep it safe, in case any drive fails to work. Merging multiple physical drives into a single pool of storage is the best thing about it.
The pools of storage can be created bigger than the physical storage space available with you. Windows 8 also allows you to plug-in another drive and take full advantage of it.
So if you feel that your system has less space, then follow the procedure to increase your storage space.
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Instructions
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Go to control panel and open Storage Space.
If your storage space has not been set-up yet, you will be given a link which will help you in creating a storage space. Information related to your storage space will be viewed in the window.
Select the drives which you want to use for the storage space and then drag your cursor down and click on the Create Pool button.
A new window will open on your screen to configure the new storage device. You will be told about the maximum capacity of your pooled drives, for instance you can combine your two 250 GB drives into a one 500 GB drive. When the drives start to fill up, and you are left with only 40GB physical limit then a notification will appear on your windows, demanding you to add more storage space.
From the Create Storage Space Window drag your cursor towards the Resiliency heading and click on the Resiliency type. Four types will be viewed; explanation of each is given below:
None: No space will be used for backup; you will lose your data if any of your drive fails.
Two-way mirror: Two copies of your data will be stored in your windows. Your data will not be lost if one of your drive fails. You will require at least two drives.
Three-way mirror: If two of your drives fail your data will remain safe because three copies of your data are saved in the three-way mirror. You will require at least three drives.
Parity: Though file accessing time is slower still it is efficient enough to help you in protecting the drive from getting failed.
After selecting an appropriate Resiliency type, click Create Storage space button and your storage space will get formatted and a new storage space will be created.
After creating the storage space you can manage it by revisiting the Storage Space in the control panel.
I have 2 old Hard drives from old PC: 1.5TB and 1TB. They are SATA III HDD (6GBps, 7200 RPM, 64MB Cache). I want to use these drives to store some videos, photos and I don’t want to split the files over two hard drives (managing two hard drives separately). Instead, it would be perfect if all videos/documents are stored in a single, big, virtual storage.
HPZ800 has 4 SATA drawers. So you can easily plug and play.
The Windows 10 Storage Space is made for this purpose. You can actually combine multiple physical hard drives into a single virtual, huge disk that can be expanded when space is used out. The storage space can be seen as the software RAID implemented on Windows 10.
Type in ‘Storage Space’ in the start-up menu, that will lead you to the Storage Space configuration.
Click the [Create A New Pool and Storage Space]
Select the Hard drives you want to be in the Pool. Please note that any drives you select here (including formatted) will be wiped so all existing data will be lost.
Select all drives and the OS formats all of them before combining into a pool.
Simple-No-Resiliency similar to RAID 0 where all data is evenly stripped across two or more disks. This improves the disk read/write performance but does not have any redundancy so that data is gone when one of the disks is failed.
Two-way-mirror – similar to RAID 1 – where all data have two copies on both drives. The data is mirrored so that it can be recovered if any drive is falling. It may have slight impact on the disk write speed. You would need at least two drives for using this.
There are other options such as Three-way-mirror where data is copied three times .. Since the data I want to store is not critically important, and I also trust the quality of the HDD, so I pick the first option – RAID 0.
It is wonderful that I can expand this virtual HDD once the space is used up, which I cannot do in traditional HDD.
Performance Comparisons
The C drive, master HDD is also brand of Seagate. The three HDDs are all 7200RPM, 64MB cache; so they should all perform similarly if measured individually.
I run the winsat disk -drive command to measure the performance of the master C drive and here is what I get.
Storage Spaces helps protect your data from drive failures and extend storage over time as you add drives to your PC. You can use Storage Spaces to group two or more drives together in a storage pool and then use capacity from that pool to create virtual drives called storage spaces. These storage spaces typically store two copies of your data so if one of your drives fails, you still have an intact copy of your data. If you run low on capacity, just add more drives to the storage pool.
You need at least two extra drives (in addition to the drive where Windows is installed). These drives can be internal or external hard drives, or solid state drives. You can use a variety of types of drives with Storage Spaces, including USB, SATA, and SAS drives.
Add or connect the drives that you want to group together with Storage Spaces.
Go to the taskbar, type Storage Spaces in the search box, and select Storage Spaces from the list of search results.
Select Create a new pool and storage space.
Select the drives you want to add to the new storage space, and then select Create pool.
Give the drive a name and letter, and then choose a layout. Two-way mirror, Three-way mirror, and Parity can help protect the files in the storage space from drive failure.
Enter the maximum size the storage space can reach, and then select Create storage space.
Simple spaces are designed for increased performance, but don’t protect your files from drive failure. They’re best for temporary data (such as video rendering files), image editor scratch files, and intermediary compiler object files. Simple spaces require at least two drives to be useful.
Mirror spaces are designed for increased performance and protect your files from drive failure by keeping multiple copies. Two-way mirror spaces make two copies of your files and can tolerate one drive failure, while three-way mirror spaces can tolerate two drive failures. Mirror spaces are good for storing a broad range of data, from a general-purpose file share to a VHD library. When a mirror space is formatted with the Resilient File System (ReFS), Windows will automatically maintain your data integrity, which makes your files even more resilient to drive failure. Two-way mirror spaces require at least two drives, and three-way mirror spaces require at least five.
Parity spaces are designed for storage efficiency and protect your files from drive failure by keeping multiple copies. Parity spaces are best for archival data and streaming media, like music and videos. This storage layout requires at least three drives to protect you from a single drive failure and at least seven drives to protect you from two drive failures.
After you upgrade to Windows 10, we recommend that you upgrade your existing pools. With an upgraded pool, you can optimize drive usage and remove drives from pools without affecting the pool’s protection from drive failure.
Note: Upgraded pools aren’t compatible with previous versions of Windows.
When you add new drives to an existing pool, it’s a good idea to optimize drive usage. This will move some of your data to the newly added drive to make the best use of the pool’s capacity. It’ll happen by default when you add a new drive to an upgraded pool in Windows 10—you’ll see a check box for Optimize to spread existing data across all drives selected when you add the drive. However, if you cleared that check box or added drives before upgrading a pool, you’ll need to manually optimize drive usage. To do so, type Storage Spaces in the search box on the taskbar, select Storage Spaces from the list of search results, and then select Optimize drive usage.
If you created a pool in Windows 10 or upgraded an existing pool, you’ll be able to remove a drive from it. The data stored on that drive will be moved to other drives in the pool, and you’ll be free to use the drive for something else.
Go to the taskbar, type Storage Spaces in the search box, and select Storage Spaces from the list of search results.
Select Change settings > Physical drives to see all the drives in your pool.
Find the drive you want to remove and select Prepare for removal > Prepare for removal. Leave your PC plugged in until the drive is ready to be removed. This could take several hours, depending on how much data you have stored there.
(Optional) To speed up drive preparation, prevent your PC from going to sleep. Type Power and sleep in the search box on the taskbar, then select Power & sleep settings. Under When plugged in, PC goes to sleep after, select Never.
When the drive is listed as Ready to remove, select Remove > Remove drive. Now, you can disconnect the drive from your PC.
Note: If you run into problems when you try to prepare the drive for removal, it might be because you don’t have enough free space in the pool to store all the data from the drive you want to remove. Try adding a new drive to the pool that’s as large as the drive you plan to remove and then try again.
When you have multiple hard drives on your computer, it can quickly become hard to keep track where your files are located. However, similar to previous versions, Windows 10 includes two features that can enable you to combine all the drives on your PC into a single large volume.
These two features are known as “Spanned” and “Striped” volumes, and both offer similar functionality, but they use different methods to write data to the hard drive.
If you use a Spanned volume, you can combine two or more hard drives of different sizes to create one large volume. On Spanned, drives are utilize sequentially, meaning data won’t be written to the second hard drive until the first hard drive is full.
On the other hand, if you use a Striped volume, you can also combine two or more hard drives to create one large volume. However, if you want to use the entire available space, you’ll need to use hard drives of the same size. On Striped, data is written across all participating drives, offering better performance than the Spanned option.
In this Windows 10 guide, we’ll walk you through the steps creating one large volume combining multiple hard drives.
How to combine multiple hard drives into one large volume
It’s important to note that you will erase the content of the hard drives participating of the Spanned or Striped volume, as such make sure to backup the data before proceeding.
- Use the Windows key + X keyboard shortcut to open the Power User menu and select Disk Management.
Right-click the hard drive volume and select Delete volume.
Click Next.
Click Next.
Click Next.
Click Finish.
You’ll be prompted to convert the hard drive from basic to dynamic, click Yes to complete the task.
Another difference between these two solutions is that you can easily add more hard drives to your computer to extend a Spanned volume, something that is not supported on Striped volumes.
The only caveat with these solutions is that you cannot use hard drives containing a Windows installation as the operating system can’t boot from a Dynamic disk. In addition, both Spanned and Striped volumes do not use parity, which means they the don’t provide fault tolerance — if one drive fails you will lose the data on all hard drives —so make sure to create regular backups of your computer.
The best solution for you will depend on what you’re trying to accomplish. If you’re looking to combine different hard drive sizes to create a large volume, then your better option may be Spanned volume. If you’re looking to increase read and write performance, while creating a large volume from multiple drives, perhaps Striped volume is the best solution.
While you can use Spanned or Striped volume on Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro, you can also use these instructions on Windows 8.1 and even Windows 7.
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that thanks to Windows 10 flexibility, you can also use Storage Spaces to create a single volume using multiple drives.
More Windows 10 resources
For more help articles, coverage, and answers on Windows 10, you can visit the following resources:
Here’s everything we know about Psychonauts 2 on Xbox and PC
The long-awaited sequel to the original Psychonauts is coming. Here’s what we know about Psychonauts 2, including its release date, gameplay, how to preorder, and much more.
On this week’s podcast . Windows 11, Cloud PC, Microsoft Teams, and more
We’re back with another exciting episode of the Windows Central Podcast, and this week, we check out the latest news on Windows 11, Windows 10 21H2, the Steam Deck handheld console, and Dan’s review of the Dell XPS 13 OLED model. All that, AND Zac sits down for a conversation with the great Mary Jo Foley!
Review: Lenovo’s Legion 5 Pro takes the gaming series to the next level
With a new 16:10 16-inch display with QHD+ resolution, insane performance, and modest design, the Legion 5 Pro is easy to recommend. However, there is a caveat with AMD performance when the laptop is on battery power.
These are the best PC sticks when you’re on the move
Instant computer — just add a screen. That’s the general idea behind the ultra-portable PC, but it can be hard to know which one you want. Relax, we have you covered!
