Member Avatar for luismidife

I have one HD of data with 120GB and I have another HD thats

completely clean with 20GB.

I want to merge both of them into one single Unit.

Can Windows do it? How? I want to do this the easiest way.

Thanks in advance.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by kaninelupus

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Short answer: Windows can present two physical disks as a single logical volume, but it’s not the same as "merging" filesystems and it carries real risk. Two built-in approaches are legacy Dynamic Disks (spanned/striped volumes) and the newer Storage Spaces pool/virtual-disk feature. Both make the OS see combined capacity, but a spanned or striped setup gives no redundancy—loss of any drive usually destroys the whole combined volume.

Practical path (least disruptive): back up the 120GB disk first. Using Disk Management, convert the drives to dynamic and create a spanned volume that concatenates the 120GB + 20GB into one logical volume. Storage Spaces (Windows 8/10/11) can also pool drives and offer parity or mirroring if redundancy is wanted. Converting or creating these volumes requires admin rights and has restrictions (some volume types and boot/system partitions may not be supported), so a full backup is essential before changing disk types.

Alternatives and trade-offs: as and suggested, keeping the drives separate lowers risk. Mirroring (RAID1) or Storage Spaces mirror gives redundancy but will only provide at most the size of the smallest disk. Replacing the pair with one larger drive (clone the 120GB disk) is often the simplest and safest way to have a single 140+ GB logical disk without pooling complexity.

Final notes: always back up before any disk-format/convert operation; verify SMART health on both disks (older drives fail faster); if the 120GB disk is the system/boot drive, prefer cloning to a larger single drive or consult exact Windows-version docs before attempting spanned/striped volumes.

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Member Avatar for Xlphos

I have one HD of data with 120GB and I have another HD thats

completely clean with 20GB.

I want to merge both of them into one single Unit.

Can Windows do it? How? I want to do this the easiest way.

Thanks in advance.

Hello,

I'm not sure it can be done but I would say it is better to have the units separate incase one fails. I would use the 20GB HDD for files that you don't want too lose. I store videos and music on my other drive just in case.

Member Avatar for kaninelupus

Have to concur. I have heard of ways to merge, but been a while so you'd have to Google search it.

Not advisable though - anything which crashed one drive would take both out at same time, so a really bad option

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