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Managing storage in Windows 11 is a fairly simple task if you have just one hard drive installed within your computer. This drive will contain Windows as well as your programs and personal files. But many times, your computer will have more than one drive such as an SSD drive for Windows and a larger SATA spinning disk for your files. Or if you are the type of person who likes to build their own computer, you may even have more than two hard drives.
If you have more than one extra hard drive in your computer and want to use all the space as a single logical drive, you can create a spanned volume out of two or more hard drives. And if you want to get some extra performance out of your drives, you can create a spanned volume instead. In this article, we will be showing you how to create a spanned or striped volume (known as RAID 0) in Windows 11.
Creating a Spanned Volume in Windows 11
To create a spanned volume in Windows, we will begin by opening the Disk Management tool which can be accessed by searching for it from the Windows taskbar search box. Once you have Disk Management open, you will be able to see the physical hard drives in your computer as well as any volumes that have been configured on them.
As you can see in the image below, this computer has the main hard drive (Disk 0) that has Windows installed on it. Then we have disks 1-3 that we will be using for our spanned drive. If you look at Disk 2, you will see that it is already in use and has the drive letter E assigned to it.
In order to use Disk 2 in our spanned volume, we will need to delete the current volume that is on that drive. When deleting a volume on a hard drive, all the data contained within that volume will be lost so make sure to back up anything that you want to save.
To delete a hard drive volume, simply right click on the volume itself and choose Delete Volume.
To create our new spanned volume using all three disks, we can right click on any one of them and choose New Spanned Volume.
We will now be able to add one or more of our blank hard drives to the spanned volume by selecting them from the left pane and clicking the Add button to add them to the right pane.
Now that all three drives are set to be added to the new spanned volume, you can see the total space that we will have after the volume has been created.
The next step involves assigning the spanned volume a drive letter. You can use any letter that is not in use by another drive.
Next, we will name our new volume Spanned and choose the Perform quick format option to format the new volume.
After clicking the Next button and then the Finish button, we will see a popup message saying that the disks will be converted from basic to dynamic since using dynamic disks is a requirement for spanned volumes. If your drives are already configured as dynamic, you will not see this message.
Once the process is complete, we will then be able to see the new spanned volume in Disk Management as shown below. As you can see, all three disks have the same drive letter and are now shown with a purple color instead of black.
When opening Windows File Explorer, we can also see the new volume with its drive letter and total space. The 230GB size comes from the 80GB, 50GB and 100GB drives combined sizes.
Now when data is written to this volume, it will be added to all three physical drives even though it looks like one single drive. But if one of the drives fails, the data that happens to be on that particular drive will be lost since disk spanning does not have any redundancy features.
If you want to remove the spanned volume, you can right click on any of the drives and choose Delete Volume. Just keep in mind that any data on the spanned volume will be lost if you do not back it up first.
Creating a Striped Volume (RAID 0)
Now we will use the same disk configuration and create a new striped volume. A striped volume (RAID 0) is a storage configuration that splits data evenly across two or more drives to improve performance by enabling faster read and write speeds. However, RAID 0 provides no redundancy, meaning if one drive fails, all data is lost. It is commonly used for high-speed applications but is not suitable for critical data storage without backups.
The process used to create a striped volume is very similar to the one used to create the spanned volume. This time we will right click on any of the disks and choose New Striped Volume.
Once again, we will add all three disks to the new volume. But this time you can see that the total available space is less than what we had for the spanned volume.
This is because the striped volume will only use the space that is available for the smallest of the three drives which in our case is 50GB. So, if we have three drives with 50GB each, that means we will have 150GB of usable space.
Once again, we will use the drive letter S and perform a quick format of the new volume.
You will once again receive the message saying the disks need to be converted to dynamic disks after you click on Next and then Finish on the next screen.
Back in Disk Management, you can see that we have used all the space from the 50GB drive and then 50GB out of the two larger drives which leaves unallocated space for those two larger drives.
When we go back to File Explorer, we can see the new striped drive with its 150GB of free space ready to be used.
Since there is free space left on two of the drives, we can now right click on the unallocated space and create a new simple volume to use this space for an additional drive letter.
We will then choose to use all the available leftover space (30GB).
We will then assign this new drive the letter E and once again choose the quick format option.
Now when we go back to Disk Management, we can see the new E drive\volume and can see that it exists on the same physical drive used for our spanned volume but is still a separate partition that can contain its own files and folders.
When going to File Explorer, we can see that we have the spanned volume and the new volume listed separately.
When using a RAID 0 striped drive, you will lose all your data if one of the hard drives fail. For example, if our 100GB drive were to fail, we would see that the entire striped volume has failed and that the drive shows as missing. One thing you can see is that the 30GB E drive is still there because it was not part of the striped volume and the physical hard drive (Disk 1) is still working.
As you can see, its easy to create a spanned or striped volume in Windows 11 and the method you will use will be based on your needs.
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