How to combine two Hard Drives into one on Windows PC

 

In earlier days, having 512GB of internal storage was more than enough to store document, music, video, etc. However, now even 2TB of internal storage becomes insufficient for some people, who work as say a video editor and need to save all the source files. There are also many movie lovers, who often collect all the movies they have watched. For them, 2TB is not a huge space to store files. If you are one of them and have installed more than one Hard Drive, here is a simple trick that will let you combine two or more hard drives into one on your Windows PC.

Combine two Hard Drives into one

There is no need to use any third-party software for this job as the built-in Disk Management functions well for this purpose.

To get started, make sure you have at least three hard drives installed. The problem with this trick is that you cannot use an installed Operating System from the hard drives. Plus you cannot install any Operating System on that combined hard drive as well.

To begin, open Disk Management on your computer. To do so, right-click on This PC > select Manage. Therefore, click on Disk Management from left side list. Alternatively, you can press Win +X and select Disk Management from the list.

Here you will find all the Hard Drives installed on your computer. Be very careful, when you are doing this step since you need to delete the whole volume (if any) and create Unallocated space. To do this, right-click on both of the hard drives and select Delete Volume. If your hard-drive is new and there is no partition, you can skip this step.

After creating unallocated space, right click on any of the clean hard drives and select New Spanned Volume.

Combine two Hard Drives into one

After clicking the Next button, you should find a window like this-

combine two hard drives into one on Windows

Here you have to select both the hard drives which you want to combine into. The right-hand side box shows the already selected hard drive. So select the hard drive in the left-hand side box and click the Add button.

By following your screen options, you will see this:

combine two hard drives into one on Windows

Here you have to select the file system, allocation unit size, volume label or partition name, etc. Make sure you have checked the Perform a quick format box. Otherwise, it will take a lot of time to format your combined hard drive.

Hit Next, and you should get a warning window like this:

combine two hard drives into one on Windows

It shows a message-

The operation you selected will convert the selected basic disk(s) to dynamic disk(s). If you convert the disk(s) to dynamic, you will not be able to start installed operating systems from any volume on the disk(s) (except the current boot volume).

You have to hit the YES button to proceed and take the operation to its conclusion.

The disadvantage of this trick is that you cannot partition the combined hard drive. Once you use the method, there will be a combined partition of two hard drives.

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