Possible to RAID two different size SSD Drives?

[gregoryvg]

So, I have a PC with a 480GB SSD. I received a 240GB SSD from someone who upgraded theirs.

1. Is there a way I can RAID them into a "single" 720GB drive?
2. Do I need a separate controller or is this built into most new Motherboards (it's an ASROCK Z68)?
3. Would I have to reinstall windows or will the extra space just appear?

Any other advice welcome as well.

Thanks!

 

[Fardringle]

RAID requires equal sizes on all drives in the array, and will only use part of any larger drives to make them match the smallest drive in the array. So, if you did put the 240GB and 480GB into a RAID, you would get 2x240GB (480GB total) which is pretty pointless.

You can SPAN the drives to make Windows treat them as one larger volume, but won't get any of the speed benefits of a RAID array...
http://www.windowscentral.com/how-create-one-large-volume-using-multiple-hard-drives-windows-10

 

[smitbret]

Sounds like you might be fairly new to RAID and storage. The only RAID that would give you the sum of the total capacities of all drives is RAID 0 that stripes the data across all the drives so that data can be read from multiple drives at the same time.

If you are just looking to make one bigger drive out of two smaller ones then this might be a good option:
http://stablebit.com/DrivePool

 

[Rubycon]

RAID0 with two different drives, while it may work isn't ideal and you're sacrificing the difference between the larger drive to the smaller. In other words, double the capacity of the SMALLEST drive that's a member of the striped array. That's a lot of overhead. If you want all the capacity, spanning (JBOD) works. Never tried this with SSDs. I'd expect performance to be OK (actual user experience). With different drives, firmware, and controllers, OTOH, do expect weird things to happen! You would be better off using both drives independently as AHCI devices.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

RAID0 with two different drives, while it may work isn't ideal and you're sacrificing the difference between the larger drive to the smaller. In other words, double the capacity of the SMALLEST drive that's a member of the striped array. That's a lot of overhead. If you want all the capacity, spanning (JBOD) works. Never tried this with SSDs. I'd expect performance to be OK (actual user experience). With different drives, firmware, and controllers, OTOH, do expect weird things to happen! You would be better off using both drives independently as AHCI devices.

That's the path I'd followed since my last 4-disk RAID5 storage with a Q6600 system. I still used "RAID-mode" in 2011 when I built my Sandy Bridge Z68 system, because I wanted to try pairing a 60GB SSD with a Velociraptor under Intel's RST. Then, when Samsung offered RAPID through Magician with their 840-Pro SSD, I needed to have AHCI to try it. At the same time, I was pooling my disks on my server with duplication.

I don't even bother with JBOD, and I try to use any additional controllers which also configure as AHCI. But I do the SSD-caching for SATA devices and RAM-caching for the NVMe 960-Pro. I use 100GB to 200GB of space on the latter to cache what is currently a 5,400 RPM Barracuda drive.

 

[gregoryvg]

Thanks guys, that's basically what I was looking for; for Windows to read both drives as one bigger drive. They are different manufacturers and all so Rubycon says there might be issues. Well worst case is it doesn't work well and I can go back to just the 480gb drive.

 

[w3rd]

No need to raid ssd's you gain ziltch. But is there a particular reason we u need the OS to see one contiguous hard drive..?

 

[mxnerd]

Use 240GB SSD as boot disk and 480GB SSD as storage.

RAID 0 has disaster written all over it.

Well worst case is it doesn't work well and I can go back to just the 480gb drive.

Worst case is you lose everything and can't get it back.

 

[Smoblikat]

As others have said, this will probobly result in a best case secnario of you having the same amount of space as before, with the added benefit of higher CPU utilization and a 100% increase in the probability that you will lose all of your data. RAID0 will use the capacity of the smallest drives to create the array, so your 240 and 480 would leave you with a strange and unreliable 480gb drive. I think youre looking for a JBOD, which also seems unnecessary to me given the hardware youre trying to combine. Benchmark both drives with somthing like crystaldiskmark, and use whichever is faster as your OS drive, and just put games on the other one. Steam lets you install games to different directories now, so having multiple SSD's in a system has become much more relevant......I still do have a copy of steammover 0.1 though

 

[gregoryvg]

No need to raid ssd's you gain ziltch. But is there a particular reason we u need the OS to see one contiguous hard drive..?

I guess just for ease of use. So I don't have to manually put things on different drives.

 

[w3rd]

Why..?

C: OS (ssd)
D: Games & Programs (ssd)
E: Music & Movies (hdd)

Keeps clutter down.

 

[funks]

I don't know about RAID but Windows 10 has storage spaces built in - if you end up with 3 different SSD's then something like the following may be worth a try..

Using powershell, you can create a Storage Spaces - You'll pretty much double the read / write speeds, works with TRIM too (unlike AMD RAID0 / RAID1 driver)

The process goes like this

1) Create a Storage Pool using the two SSD's

2) Create a Virtual Disk (NumberOfColumns = 2, Type = Simple Space, Interleave = 16KB, ProvisioningType = Thin, Disk Size = exactly 2x of the smaller SSD).

Once created, you'll still have some primordial space available on the BIGGER SSD, you can create another virtual disk on it - obviously not getting 2x the speed up when accessing that specific one though. The virtual disk you've created using NumberOfColumns=2 will have about 2x the read and write speed though.

Make sure you have regular backups of your PC. This doesn't work on BOOT drives though.

C = SSD1 (boot drive only).
D = STORAGE SPACE (SSD2, and SSD3) - DATA/PROGRAMS (Virtual Disk with NumberOfColumns=2, Type = Simple , ....)
E = STORAGE SPACE - OTHER ( Virtual Disk from remaining Primordial Space on larger SSD3)

You'll get 2X read and write performance on D..

 

[w3rd]

What..?

How does that do anything? Other than create an indexed partition. It doesn't make your ssd faster.

 

[Qamsunrer]

I don't know about RAID but Windows 10 has storage spaces built in - if you end up with 3 different SSD's then something like the following may be worth a try..

Using powershell, you can create a Storage Spaces - You'll pretty much double the read / write speeds, works with TRIM too (unlike AMD RAID0 / RAID1 driver)

The process goes like this

1) Create a Storage Pool using the two SSD's

2) Create a Virtual Disk (NumberOfColumns = 2, Type = Simple Space, Interleave = 16KB, ProvisioningType = Thin, Disk Size = exactly 2x of the smaller SSD).

Once created, you'll still have some primordial space available on the BIGGER SSD, you can create another virtual disk on it - obviously not getting 2x the speed up when accessing that specific one though. The virtual disk you've created using NumberOfColumns=2 will have about 2x the read and write speed though.

Make sure you have regular backups of your PC. This doesn't work on BOOT drives though.

C = SSD1 (boot drive only).
D = STORAGE SPACE (SSD2, and SSD3) - DATA/PROGRAMS (Virtual Disk with NumberOfColumns=2, Type = Simple , ....)
E = STORAGE SPACE - OTHER ( Virtual Disk from remaining Primordial Space on larger SSD3)

You'll get 2X read and write performance on D..

Thanks for your answer

 

[funks]

What..?

How does that do anything? Other than create an indexed partition. It doesn't make your ssd faster.

What do you mean? In the use case I talked about..

Legend:

SSD1 (boot Drive)
SSD2 (240 GB), SSD3 (480GB)

Storage Spaces can use SSD2 and SSD3 in a Storage Pool. One can create a 480GB virtual disk striped across SSD2 and SSD3 (NumberOfColumns=2,Type=Simple...), that particular virtual disk will have DOUBLE the READ and WRITE performance of a Single SSD. Useful for certain use-cases (maybe a good place for programs, data files, video editing scratch disk?). The remaining 240 GB on SSD3 (which is still available from the storage pool and can be allocated as yet another virtual disk) can actually be mounted as a different drive, or a directory - albeit, it'll only have the performance of SSD3.

Works for me - I had 2 - 480 GB SSD's lying around and I used storage spaces to create one big virtual disk from it (NumberOfColumns=2 which analogous to RAID0), I'm getting twice the read and write performance from that Virtual Disk compared to just using one of the SSD's.

Storage Spaces doesn't have the same limitation as AMD RAID (I have Ryzen) - it can use two different drive sizes (the space difference between the drives is still accessible and available for use as another virtual disk), doesn't need drivers, and works with TRIM.

 

[funks]

#Quick Cheat Sheet for Storage Spaces#

Run powershell in an admin Command Window

"powershell"

- execute the following powershell commands -

# List Physical Drives that is available for pooling
Get-PhysicalDisk -CanPool $true

# Create a new Storage Pool using poolable disks

New-StoragePool -FriendlyName "SSD-SP" -StorageSubSystemUniqueId (Get-StorageSubSystem -FriendlyName "Windows Storage on WORKSTATION-PC").uniqueID -PhysicalDisks (Get-PhysicalDisk -CanPool $true)

# Create a new Virtual Disk (mimic RAID 0)

New-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName "DATA" -StoragePoolFriendlyName "SSD-SP" -Interleave 16384 -NumberOfColumns 2 -NumberOfDataCopies 1 -ResiliencySettingName Simple -ProvisioningType Fixed -UseMaximumSize

# Get the newly created Virtual Disk number
Get-Disk

# Create a new Partition using the Virtual Disk Number
New-Partition -DiskNumber ? -UseMaximumSize -AssignDriveLetter

# Format the new Partition as REFS
Format-Volume -DriveLetter ? -FileSystem REFS -NewFileSystemLabel "DATA"