Raid with 2 External HD's

[jdl8422]

I have a 250GB Western Digital Ext. HD, I just picked up a 1TB Western Digital Ext. HD. I hate to have the 250gb sit around and do nothing, So my question is, Can I hook them together somehow and make them act as 1. I know both of them have multiple ports on the back, Just a thought.

 

[I'm a Mac]

Why don't you use the 250 GB as a portable solution? It's pretty small compared to the 1TB. Think of it as a mega flash drive without flash memory. Besides, I don't think you'll need more than 1TB or storage, and the extra HD could be a space waster on your desk.

 

[jdl8422]

True, but I have a 160GB portable HD I use for school and work, plus the
250gb has a power adapter which is a pain. The 250GB prob wont make or break me as far as space, I just hate to see it do nothing lol

 

[I'm a Mac]

True, but I have a 160GB portable HD I use for school and work, plus the 250gb has a power adapter which is a pain. The 250GB prob wont make or break me as far as space, I just hate to see it do nothing lol

I know what you mean. I would hate to see it useless... Try maybe giving it to a friend/family member with a PC- tell them PC hard drives go bad quickly, or you could give it as a present to someone who has leopard and use it as their time machines. Or, there's always Ebay.

 

[hayduke]

There is really no way to combine the two drives, but I can't think of a reason that you would really want to do that. I would just use it as another back-up drive or I would sell it.

 

[Decrepit]

I have a 250GB Western Digital Ext. HD, I just picked up a 1TB Western Digital Ext. HD. I hate to have the 250gb sit around and do nothing, So my question is, Can I hook them together somehow and make them act as 1. I know both of them have multiple ports on the back, Just a thought.

Terminology thing...

RAID would not be what you're looking for. If you want to stick them together to look like a 1.25 GB HDD, you're looking to create a spanning volume set.

If you were really doing RAID, it would turn the 1TB drive into a 250 GB drive so that either the stripes or the mirrorset would be identically sized.

As far as how to do it, that's another story. It would probably be best to use the two as separate drives. If you span the drives into one large drive, and one of the two fail, you could lose everything depending on how you set up your partition table, etc.

 

[andy.barron]

One solution would be to partition your 1Tb into 4x 250gb drives so your desktop would then show 5 drives of 250Gb capacity. Then organise your housekeeping to say have music files on one, personal data on another etc. etc.

Just a thought but may be an idea.