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I want to buy into my server three hard drives like Intel 750 Series. Then from windows server 2016 I'd like to treat them as one logical drive ( for example as drive C:\ ). How to achieve it?

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  • Does your hardware support RAID? Have you done any research on this topic? Oct 17, 2017 at 22:40
  • No, it doesn't. WRT research I found about spanning hard drives. But spanning will give me two logical hdds, and I'd like to have one logical Oct 17, 2017 at 22:43
  • Are you creating this server as a Virtual Machine? If so, what is the hypervisor you're using? Oct 17, 2017 at 22:46
  • Not, as bare metal server Oct 17, 2017 at 22:49
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    Is this a test machine? Or would it bother you if you lost all of the data you plan to put on these drives? Oct 17, 2017 at 22:52

2 Answers 2

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Yes, you can merge multiple drives into a single logical drive using the function you know as "Spanning".

This will work fine for additional storage, application installation, and disk space for virtual machines.

However

Based on your question I'm going to assume that you want to install the OS onto this spanned drive, and the answer to this is not a chance, no.

If you wish to install the Operating System onto a multi-drive array, something outside the OS has to do the joining of the drives so that the OS only sees a single volume to install on and run on.

The only way to do this on a bare-metal setup is to use a hardware solution such as RAID.

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Windows Storage Spaces lets you combine multiple drives into a single virtual drive. It works for data drives, not operating system drives. This increases your failure rate.

You haven't said why you want to do this, which would've helped us give you better answer. In most cases you can spread your data across multiple drives. Possible better options are:

  1. Buying a bigger single drive, along with an appropriate backup disk
  2. Using multiple disks with different drive letters
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  • I want to have on that drive database Oct 17, 2017 at 22:51
  • The only benefit for this setup is size. It will not be faster, it will be less reliable, and you'll just generally have more problems. If your DB is supporting any sort of production system, this is a very, very bad idea. If this is just a casual lab setup, I'd still recommend against it, but at least you'll be the only person to get hurt when it fails. Oct 17, 2017 at 22:55
  • As has been said, no, this won't work for an OS drive. Just put your database on another drive. If it's a large database you can have it use multiple drives.
    – Tim
    Oct 17, 2017 at 23:38

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