Question Win10 Drive spanning with different SSDs

[MrTeal]

So my desktop currently has a 500GB 850 Evo as a boot drive, and another 500GB 850 EVO as well as a Mushkin 1TB Reactor as general storage and for Steam. Backups, bluray rips, etc are all on an unraid server so this is all just local storage.

I'm thinking of moving my boot drive over to a 500GB class NVMe drive, which would leave me with 2TB of storage on 3 drives attached to SATA ports.

Ideally I'd really like to just have those all on one drive so I can set my windows store and steam locations there and forget about them, but I'm not sure the ideal means to do so.The simplest would be to combine them all in windows with a spanned drive, but I'm hesitant since my understanding is that it completely fills one first and I don't want one SSD at 100% while the others are empty.

I could also raid 0 the two EVOs, and then create a windows striped volume from those and the 1TB Reactor. That would evenly distribute the data, but is getting a little complex. It should offer the best performance though, AFAIK.

Any other big drawbacks or advantages to either method, or better ways to do the same thing?

 

[mindless1]

I don't know what your individual (divisible) data set sizes are, but I would consider RAID 0 for the 2 x500GB but then leave the 1TB out of it so you have two, 1TB volumes to use for different purposes.

Another option, sell the 2 x 500GB and get a 1TB NVMe. You lose some capacity but gain some unity. Do you really need the capacity with a server too?

Then again I have 3 x 240GB old SSDs Raided to 720GB in a system and haven't had any problems, it's just that it depends on the host raid controller working, can't be transferred to another system without consideration of the controller or copying the data off first. I don't think it's too complex, just that I wouldn't put my most important data on it, but then I'd have a redundant backup of that anyway.

 

[MrTeal]

I know you can divide up your Steam library, I'm not sure the same applies with the Microsoft store. Optionally I could leave my Steam and other random stuff on the 1TB drive (currently about half full), and RAID 0 the 500GB drives and use those for Xbox Game Pass game installs. That wouldn't be too much effort to manage, and avoids the trouble of messing with Windows virtual volumes.