Question Can I make 2 NVme drives behave as 1?

[Caveman]

Is there a way to make the OS think it is seeing one contiguous 2 TB drive from two, 1 TB NVme drives.

I'm looking for the fastest way to config a flight simulation rig. All it will have is the OS and flights sims, etc... Those may total more than 1 TB and if I install the flight sim on a second drive, my understanding is that's just a bad way to do things... Thoughts on setup for someone that need a lot of drive space but wants the programs to operate as fast as possible?

 

[damian101]

Seems like what you want is a 2TB RAID0 volume from those two hard 1TB SSDs?
Do you want to install Windows on that 2TB RAID0 volume, or just access it from Windows?

 

[Caveman]

I don't know... I have very little understanding in this area aside from the "givens"

1) I really don't care if I have to install programs on a separate drive from where the OS is but my understanding is that it's a bad idea to do that (speed issues, etc...). Going for the fastest configuration
2) As a follow on to #1, speed may be a concern (the OS likes to talk "directly" to the programs on the same drive for best performance). Thought this was a basic fact but maybe something I learned wrong...
3) Making the OS think it's on the same drive as all programs (those installed on another drive) may get around any issue introduced by having them on separate drives... I just don't know...
4) I've never tried RAID, but assumed it's not that hard. Is it a bios config thing?

 

[MalVeauX]

Heya,

As above, you can either setup your SSD in RAID0 to stripe them together as one unit.

Or you can replace them with a single 2TB SSD and clone your current system(s) to it.

Very best,

 

[damian101]

I don't know... I have very little understanding in this area aside from the "givens"

1) I really don't care if I have to install programs on a separate drive from where the OS is but my understanding is that it's a bad idea to do that (speed issues, etc...). Going for the fastest configuration
2) As a follow on to #1, speed may be a concern (the OS likes to talk "directly" to the programs on the same drive for best performance). Thought this was a basic fact but maybe something I learned wrong...
3) Making the OS think it's on the same drive as all programs (those installed on another drive) may get around any issue introduced by having them on separate drives... I just don't know...
4) I've never tried RAID, but assumed it's not that hard. Is it a bios config thing?

1-2) It doesn't matter if a program that's installed on one drive has to work with data from another drive. The program is loaded into RAM anyway. If at all it should have a small positive impact.

There are three ways of creating RAID volumes:
1. Hardware RAID: RAID is managed by dedicated RAID controller, OS only sees the RAID volume. Currently very expensive for Nvme drives.
2. Firmware RAID: RAID is managed by Motherboard firmware, runs on CPU, and is set up and configured in the motherboard's firmware settings. It might need drivers to be detected by Windows, which can makes Windows installation on such a RAID volume much more complicated.
3. Software RAID: Hard drives are kept transparent to the operating system. RAID is either an extra layer on which the filesystem is installed or part of the filesystem. On Windows the only way to do this are Dynamic Volumes. They are easy to set up in Windows Disk Management, but you sadly can't install Windows on one.