Combining two hard drives into one (RAID?)

[Providence]

Hi, kinda experienced with computers in most ways (built the machine I'm currently using, 8 Gb ram, QX9650, watercooled GTS 8800 vid).

Now for my server I've got an old Dell XPS Gen 4 computer running Windows Server 2008. It has an SSD drive to boot off of and a media volume to hold my movies.

The movies get streamed to my 73" HDTV using a spiffy Dvico media player over my network.

The problem is I filled my 1 Tb with movies so I bought a 2 Tb. I saw an option to mount the volume inside another volume so I did that. However it just created a folder inside my 1 Tb instead of giving me what I thought would be a 3 Tb combined set up.

Clearly I oversimplified this.

Is the answer RAID? I don't know much about it and I don't have a RAID card or anything. I just want to either A) combine both volumes to reflect a single 3 Tb partition or B) Get the Dvico to read from two separate drives, which I don't think it supports. At least at once, anyway.

Any help?

 

[tonyyy]

If your motherboard supports it you can create a RAID 0/1/5.

RAID 0 and 1 requires atleast 2 drives while RAID 5 will require atleast 3 drives to work.

However if you do RAID it will wipe the data off your drive.

also please note that if you have one drive that is smaller then the other drive the RAID will only give you storage of both drives that equals the amount of the small drive. Since you got 1TB hd and a 2TB hd your raid will only be 2TB's.

I would check if your motherboard supports JBOD. If so this will allow you to use a total of 3 TB.

I'm not sure if the data will be wipe if you do JBOD.

So I would back up your data first.

good luck

 

[Providence]

Crap.

The computer I built has a RAID controller which from what I've looked up is what I need for JBOD. However the server I'm wanting to use this for does not.

Guess I can buy a cheap PCI RAID card?

EDIT: Saw the bit about disadvantages on software RAID, not a good idea...I need to flawlessly stream 16 Mb/s. I think I'll invest in a card and look into this further. Thanks for the reply.

J

 

[Farva]

Depends on your definition of cheap. Some 4 drive controllers are between 115-150, 8 drives are 200-250.