How do you combine 6 hard drive to creat one big hard drive over 1 TB?

Question

I have 6 internal hard drive and I want to know if its possible to somehow convert it to make it into a external drive and how do I combine all six drive into one big storage. Do I need anything special

Answer 1

You can use Windows to stripe data across all drives and create a large volume, but you're six times as likely to lose everything if a drive goes out. With six drives, you should use a RAID controller with RAID 5 which will allow a drive to fail and still be functional until the drive is replaced. You'll also have much higher read performance and write performance (with full stripe writes) as the workload is spread across several physical disks.



If these are PATA drives, check out 3ware controllers (try ebay). If these are SATA, there are a number of vendors that sell RAID controllers - 3ware, LSI, Highpoint, Adaptec, Promise. I believe all of these vendors have 8 port SATA RAID controllers.



With the exception of Highpoint, the controllers mentioned above are hardware RAID controllers which means that the controllers have their own processor and memory instead of using system CPU and memory for RAID 5 calculations and cache.

Answer 2

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Answer 3

ahhhhhhhhhh

do u want to add 6 itself or more ?

first decide that



u need to do something called as a raid array.

RAID 0/1 JBOD is the method used to do it.



u get hardware cards in market to do the same.

some motherboards support it.

some operating systems support something called as software raid.

RAID = redundant array of inexpensive disks.



remember the rate of failure/ the probabilty that u will loose data also increases with this.

so better go for some redundancy..

check out wikipedia for more info on raid.

Answer 4

You can combine your drives using a RAID controller. It allows you to combine drives in various ways. The configuration you want is RAID Level 0. This allows you to add the capacity of each drive together. Please note that when one of the drives fails, the data on the other drives is not recoverable!



Although you could combine various drives together, I would strongly recommend that all drives be the same manufacturer and model.



Your drive type should also be compatible with the type of RAID controller you are using. There are ISA, SATA and SCSI drive types. Make sure that all the drives are the same type and that your RAID controller supports the drive type.

Answer 5

This is something I do regularly in a linux/unix environment. In unix you use a tool such as LVM (Linux Volume Manager), Veritas or Solstice Disksuite. These tools are free with unix, except Veritas which is bloody expensive. I'm sure if you google around, you will find a similar tool (Volume Manager) for windows.



Don't forget that if you concatenate 6 drives into 1 meta volume, then one of your drives fails, you will probably loose all of the data from the volume. You would be better off, (with a slight performance overhead) to set up your drives into a RAID 5 metavolume.



This might be worth a read

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_volume_management

Answer 6

You will need a Larg Tower and some Bay arrays.

Usually a 6 Hard Drive array is more of a Server config, however, I have set up 5 drive arrays, 2 in the main part and 3, sometimes 4 ( if I took drive 2 out ) in the bay. Cabling is going to be your Big problem. So you will have to hunt out a tower OR get a Card that will take additional IDE or ( at a pinch) Serial drives... I do not recommend the serial in a config this large on a regular tower.

It can be done, but you are better off buying the 1 or 1.5 Terabyte drives, but make sure that you have a Backup, cos the drives will almost certainly give you some headaches.

If you have the compatible drives, but a server, small server, with the capacity for 6 Hard drives, but shop carefully, new, you can get a lower class Server for 1,700 US Dollars, second hand, maybe 900 or so for a decent one

Answer 7

Most RAID cards will take sometimes up to 4 drives that you can cascade into a virtual network and run off of, the only problem with 6 drives is you would need 2 raid cards and stripe them to 2 drive sectors.



The only thing that I know will allow you to handle more is a network tray system similar to the large mainframe units in corporate server, you may have to switch over to that format.

Answer 8

There is a facility in Windows that will let you treat multiple hard drives like one drive. It;s done through the command prompt. Best place to look is in the Microsoft knowledge base website. I've looked into this but will be honest and tell you that I don't know a great deal about it. If you wanted to have them external then you would need a hard drive enclosure for each one.



It would probably just be cheaper to buy a couple of bigger drives to be honest.

Answer 9

set them up in a raid 5

Answer 10

Sounds like you want a Raid configuration, you may need to by a Raid controller card. I am sure others will post more info on it

Answer 11

I agree with the dude below me...you can't.

Answer 12

You can't.