Virtually merging two disks

[jji7skyline]

Is it possible to virtually merge two HDDs so that they appear as one drive? This would be useful because most of my HDD is filled with photos, and eventually, I'll have to buy an external drive. I've heard that the iPhoto library cannot split itself into two without buying Aperture.

 

[Apple2]

Use a raid card if you have a Mac Pro, otherwise you could try to find some software raid options.

 

[Detrius]

If you're Unix-savvy, you could take advantage of the Unix underpinnings with a union mount. It's in the mount(8) man page. You could potentially put a manual entry in /etc/fstab for it to work on every boot.

If this isn't enough information to get you going, then this would not be a good route to take.

 

[Hellhammer]

Disk Utility's JBOD is all you need.

 

[Detrius]

Disk Utility's JBOD is all you need.

Disk Utility does JBOD? That's handy.

 

[NorCalLights]

Is it possible to virtually merge two HDDs so that they appear as one drive? This would be useful because most of my HDD is filled with photos, and eventually, I'll have to buy an external drive. I've heard that the iPhoto library cannot split itself into two without buying Aperture.

You can do this by using Disk Utility to create a JBOD (as others have mentioned), but you will have to format both drives, erasing all of their data.

Instead, I would suggest just buying a massive external hard drive and migrating your entire library to that. You can get a 2TB drive for $80 these days... add another $20 for an external firewire enclosure, and you're good to go.

If you want to add some redundancy, think about an external RAID enclosure.

If you need help with any of this, this forum is a wealth of info.