Harddrives without raid??

[Atlantean]

I currently have an 80 gig seagate hdd, but I have only like 500 mb of free space, and I am thinking that it is time for an upgrade. So I think that I am going to get a 100 gig wd hdd. Do I have to run raid to have it read as one harddrive? Or would I have to have a separate set of drive letters?

 

[Strych9]

Generally with RAID you want two HDD's of the same size. You are gonna lose 20gigs of space if you get the 100 and RAID 0 it with the 80. And yes you can run them separate.

 

[Atlantean]

But can I run them without raid so and have my computer recognize it as one harddrive?

 

[RazeOrc]

That's what RAID is and that's what it does unless you partition your RAID. Otherwise not to my knowledge can you do that, what's so bad about having 2 seperate drive letters? I have 5 right now and i'll prolly go to 10 once I redo my 160GB RAID 0 drive, I use seperate ones for operating systems, games, applications, ect. Nice and orderly, and best of all you can reformat your OS drives and just update ur registry without reinstalling all those progs

 

[FlipSide]

You have 2 physical drives, the only way (atm) to recognize as 1 drive is using raid configuration. Unless you can find an overlay program to make the physical drives as 1 logical drive.

 

[Atlantean]

The reason I don't want raid is because from what I hear it is a little unstable.

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

<< The reason I don't want raid is because from what I hear it is a little unstable. >>

just have to know what you're doing

 

[Scootin159]

RAID in it's own right is just as stable as the drives running on it. You should check the FAQ for a description of various RAID modes, and you may be interested in the one called JBOD

 

[GoldenTiger]

RAID is just as stable as a single drive... it strains the drives more though since they work harder, so they will fail slightly sooner (maybe 6 years instead of 6.5-7). It is *far* faster than just a single drive.

 

[FlipSide]

It is also advisable to run identical drives in a raid configuration. I am confused, what is so bad in having 2 or more drives seen by the OS? Is there anything special that restricts you to only 1 logical drive?

 

[Burnt]

The more, the merrier, I have 4.