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How to Combine Multiple Hard Drives Into One Volume for Cheap, High-Capacity Storage

February 26th, 2013Top Story

How to Combine Multiple Hard Drives Into One Volume for Cheap, High-Capacity Storage

By Whitson Gordon

How to Combine Multiple Hard Drives Into One Volume for Cheap, High-Capacity StorageOnce you've gone through a few computers, you probably have more than a few old hard drives lying around. You don't have to let them go to waste, though! Here's how to combine multiple hard drives into one, huge volume that'll hold just about anything.

Storage is pretty cheap these days, and buying a new hard drive is always going to be the best way to increase your storage. However, maybe you're on a strict budget and can't afford a new drive. In that case, you might be better off combining some old drives you have lying around. Or, maybe you have other specific needs that require lots of space on one volume. For example, perhaps you're:

  • You're storing terabytes worth of of movies, TV shows, music, or other media you've ripped and want it all on one volume
  • You need lots of consecutive storage for video editing, photo editing, or other "scratch disk" needs
  • You have a lot of games that have to be stored on the same volume (e.g., Steam games) but can't fit them all on one drive

In this guide, we'll discuss three options for combining multiple hard drives, how to do each, and their advantages and disadvantages to one another.

Option One: Use Symbolic Links

By far the easiest method is to use symbolic links, which are similar to shortcuts, but "fool" your system into thinking its the actual folder it links to. So, this allows you to store a folder on your second drive, create a symbolic link to it on your first drive, and it'll feel like all the files are on that first drive (even though they aren't). And, unlike shortcuts, programs on your computer won't know that one folder isn't the real deal. Let's take the video game example from above: Steam requires all your games to reside on the same drive, but if you have more games than can fit on one drive, you can move some of them to a second drive and set up symbolic links on the first drive so Steam is none the wiser.

To do this in Windows:

How to Combine Multiple Hard Drives Into One Volume for Cheap, High-Capacity Storage

  1. Find one of the folders that you want to move to your second drive. In this case, let's say it's C:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\Portal. Move that folder to your second drive, and note its location (in this case, we'll say it's D:\Games\Portal.
  2. Open up the Start menu and type cmd. Press Enter to open up a Command Prompt window.
  3. Type the following command and press Enter:
    mklink /J C:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\Portal D:\Games\Portal

    Notice that the first path is the location of the link, and the second path is the location of the moved folder. Obviously, replace the two file paths with the paths on your system.

    If you were creating a hard link to a file instead of a folder, you would use /H instead of /J after the command.

  4. Reopen Steam and try to launch your game. It will look in the old path, find the hard link, and be directed to the game's new location.

You can also use free software like Link Shell Extension (or, in the case of video games, Steam Mover) to perform the same task without the command line.

To do this in OS X:

How to Combine Multiple Hard Drives Into One Volume for Cheap, High-Capacity Storage

  1. Find one of the folders that you want to move to your second drive. In this case, let's say it's /Users/yourusername/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/Portal. Move that folder to your second drive, and note its location (in this case, we'll say it's /Volumes/Games/Portal).
  2. Open up a Terminal window (through /Applications/Utilities/Terminal).
  3. Type the following command and press Enter:
    ln -s /Volumes/Games/Portal "/Users/yourusername/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/Portal"

    Notice that the first path is the location of the moved folder, and the second path is the location of the link. Obviously, replace the two file paths with the paths on your system.

  4. Reopen Steam and try to launch your game. It will look in the old path, find the hard link, and be directed to the game's new location.

Of course, you can also perform this function on just about any OS out there, including Linux. Windows users can also mount an entire drive to a folder using built-in Windows features. Search around for instructions on your specific OS for more information.

Pros: This method's biggest advantage is that it's easy, and allows you to control the location of each specific file or folder. It works with any number of drives of any capacity and speed. If one of your drives fails, you only lose the data on that drive, and the other drives stay intact.

Cons: If you need to do this with a lot of files or folders, it can get to be very tedious and annoying. If you're storing hundreds of videos (like movies and TV shows), this probably wouldn't be optimal.

Option Two: Create a Spanned Volume

If you have a lot of files and folders to work with and you want them all on one volume (and symbolic links aren't ideal), you have another option: creating a spanned volume (also known as disk concatenation). Spanned volumes are like the opposite of partitioning: you create one volume that starts at the beginning of your first disk, and ends at the end of your last disk, creating one giant volume. This is often also referred to as Just a Bunch of Disks (JBOD). There's a lot of controversy over whether it is actually correct to call it this, so we won't use it here—just know that elsewhere around the net, you may see these two terms used interchangeably.

To create a spanned volume in Windows:

How to Combine Multiple Hard Drives Into One Volume for Cheap, High-Capacity Storage

  1. Back up any data on your drives, since you'll need to erase the ones you're spanning.
  2. Open the Start menu and type diskmgmt.msc. Click on the option that appears and find the disks you want to combine.
  3. If your disks have data on them, right-click on each and choose "Delete Volume." Make sure you're deleting the correct volumes!
  4. Right-click on the first of the now-empty drives you want to add to your span and choose "Create New Spanned Volume."
  5. When the New Spanned Volume wizard starts, click Next until you get to the Select Disks screen. Highlight the second disk you want to add to the span, then click the Add button. Continue this process until all the disks you want are on the right size of the selection wizard, then click Next.
  6. Assign your spanned volume a drive letter, then click Next. Format it as NTFS and give it a name. When it's finished, you're ready to use your new spanned volume.

To create a spanned volume in OS X:

How to Combine Multiple Hard Drives Into One Volume for Cheap, High-Capacity Storage

  1. Back up any data on your drives, since you'll need to erase the ones you're spanning.
  2. Open up /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility and click on one of the drives you're going to use. Head to the "Erase" tab, choose "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" from the dropdown menu, and click Erase. Repeat this process for the other drives you want to include in the span.
  3. Click on one of the now-empty drives you're going to use, and click the "RAID" tab. Give your set of disks a name, choose "Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the format, and choose "Concatenated Disk Set" for "RAID type."
  4. Click the plus sign to add the array to the list.
  5. Drag your hard drives one-by-one from Disk Utility's left sidebar into the right pane, under the disk set you just created. When all the disks are in place, click Create to create the spanned volume.

Spanned volumes are a little different in every operating system, but the process is similar. Linux users can use a feature called Logical Volume Management, and most other OSes should have an option for this too—heck, even Nas4Free has it built right in. Google your own OS for instructions on how to perform similar functions (and remember, it might be referred to as JBOD or disk concatenation).

Pros: Managing a spanned volume is much easier than managing symbolic links, since once you've created it, you don't actually have to "manage" anything. It just shows up on your computer as one big drive. When it runs out of space on the first physical disk, it moves onto the second without you having to worry about it. This also works with any number of drives at any combination of speeds, unlike RAID.

Cons: The biggest problem with spanned volumes is that they introduce a greater probability of drive failure. If you have a volume spanned over three drives, that's three drives that could fail instead of just one, and if one of your drives fails, you lose all of the data in that spanned volume (though some of it may be recoverable).

As such, we don't recommend this option for most scenarios. However, if you have a lot of data that isn't particularly important—or is backed up elsewhere (like a bunch of DVDs and Blu-Ray discs that you've ripped)—this might be an okay option. Just be aware of the downsides and the necessary precautions to keep your data safe.

Option Three: Set Up a RAID Array

The last option is using a Redundant Array of Independent Disks, also known as RAID. It offers a lot of benefits that disk spanning doesn't, like speed, reliability, and protection against drive failure. There are a number of different types of RAID, though, and they each serve slightly different purposes. Here are the most common:

  • RAID 0 is similar to a spanned volume: its main goal is to combine multiple drives into one big volume. However, instead of spanning your volumes, it uses something called striping: instead of filling up one drive and moving onto the next, it writes data across all of your drives. This means read speeds are faster than a spanned volume, since you can read multiple parts of the data at one time. However, if one drive fails, then you lose all your data with little hope of recovery.
  • RAID 1 doesn't actually combine multiple disks into one big volume at all. Instead, it implements a concept called mirroring: Whenever your main drive is written to, your computer writes the same data to your second drive. Your second drive is a mirror of your first one so that if one fails, you can pick right up with the second drive as if nothing went wrong.
  • RAID 10 combines the best of RAID 0 and RAID 1: you create a mirrored RAID 1 array, then combine that with other RAID 1 arrays for one big, mirrored volume. This type of RAID requires quite a few disks (two to combine and another two to mirror, at the minimum), so it can be quite costly.
  • RAID 5 introduces a feature called parity, which is another method for keeping your data protected from drive failure. Unlike RAID 10, in which you need to use half of your drives for redundancy, RAID 5 can store that recovery data in much smaller parity bits, spread across your drives. That means you can use more of your drives for data and hopefully save a bit of money. RAID 5 will be much slower to write data than RAID 10, though, so there is a tradeoff.

These aren't the only types of RAID, but they are the most common. We could do a whole set of features on each type of RAID, so we won't go into a ton of detail here, but you get the general concept: with RAID 10 or RAID 5, you can expand a volume across multiple disks without worrying about an increased risk of failure, as you would with disk spanning.

There are a number of ways to set up a RAID array. You can use software RAID, which is built-in to many motherboards and follows very similar instructions to creating a spanned volume (you would just choose a striped, mirrored, or RAID 5 array instead). Many people argue that hardware RAID, however, is more reliable, which involves installing a RAID card into your PC and setting up RAID using that. The process varies from computer to computer and from RAID card to RAID card, but our guide to RAID mirroring should help get you started if you're interested. Windows 8 users might also check out the new Storage Spaces feature, which isn't RAID, but has a lot of similar goals and features.

Pros: Higher levels of RAID offer the ability to turn multiple drives into one, big, often fast volume without worrying about losing your data. RAID is not a replacement for backup, but it does make your life a lot easier if one of those drives fails. RAID 0 does not provide this redundancy, but is still faster than a spanned volume.

Cons: Unfortunately, RAID has a few downsides too. To start, higher levels of RAID can be expensive, since you need quite a few drives to pull it off. They'd also have to be the same size and speed, or you'd have to sacrifice some of their size and speed. That is, in a RAID array, you're stuck using the smallest disk's capacity for each drive, and the slowest disk's speed for each drive. As such, it isn't ideal if you have a bunch of disks lying around and you're trying to save some money. But, if your data is important, it can help keep that data safe, too. RAID 0's biggest downside is not only the lack of redundancy, but the fact that if you lose one drive, you lose all your data—with little to no hope of recovering it.

Combining multiple disks into one volume is a fairly controversial practice, as it can increase the risk of drives failing. However, if the situation is right—that is, if your data is unimportant, if you have it all backed up, or if you have redundancy built-in—combining those drives can be pretty handy.

Images by Spectrum (Shutterstock) and NasonovVasiliy (Shutterstock).

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I Used To Smoke Pot Every Time I Played A Video Game. Here's Why I Stopped.

February 26th, 2013Top Story

I Used To Smoke Pot Every Time I Played A Video Game. Here's Why I Stopped.

By Dennis Scimeca

I Used To Smoke Pot Every Time I Played A Video Game. Here's Why I Stopped.I started smoking pot during my junior year of college, after a loud and messy breakup with my first girlfriend that sent me into an absolutely manic rage. It was shortly after she left, bawling, that one of my roommates asked if I wanted to get high. I guess that was his way of trying to make me feel better. That night I was introduced to a six-foot-bong, which I filled with smoke and cleared twice, and then we all sat down to watch the news.

I wasn't thinking about the breakup anymore or the misery I'd felt in the days prior to calling it quits. All that pain and rage were gone. I was thinking about how funny the news and the commercials were, and then about getting something to eat when I got really hungry out of nowhere. Someone had the idea to get my Super Nintendo Entertainment System, hook it up to the big television in the living room and play 2-on-2 NHL '94.

I had never been so engrossed in a video game before. So began my love affair with playing games while I was high. It would end about as well as my relationship with my first girlfriend.

A Chronicle Of My Descent While Getting High

It wasn't until I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder that I understood I was self-medicating with marijuana.

It's distressingly common for people with mood disorders to abuse drugs in order to manage the symptoms of their illness. It makes perfect sense if you think about mental illness as an altered state of consciousness. A normal, balanced person doesn't hear voices or fly into rages for no good reason or spontaneously sink into depressions, but a person with mental illness might suffer any or all of these. Mental illness changes the way someone thinks and perceives the world. The effects are random and unpredictable.

Imagine how easy it is to begin self-medicating with drugs when a person like me, who has a mood disorder, discovers they have the ability to choose when their consciousness gets altered and realized they can ensure the experience is pleasurable.

Had you asked me prior to my diagnosis why I smoked, I would have sounded like the pothead archetype played by Jon Stewart in Half Baked. I was an enhancement smoker, someone who thought pot made everything better, and pot enhanced no experience like it enhanced playing video games.

I was an enhancement smoker, someone who thought pot made everything better, and pot enhanced no experience like it enhanced playing video games.

It was shortly after the night I inhaled those first six-footers that I discovered Civilization. Ever since I'd received my first Nintendo Entertainment System I'd sometimes stay up moderately late playing video games, but rarely past midnight. Once I discovered pot, I'd rip a few of those six foot bong hits in the early evening and immediately sit down to play Civ until dawn, when I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer.

When I played Civilization sober it could feel tedious and slow compared to my traditional diet of console action and head-to-head sports games, but when I played Civilization while high I lost myself in the endless minutiae of building roads and cultivating cropland and moving soldiers around. I embraced the fantasy of controlling things like a god. Of course I toked up before I played Civilization. It made the game so much better.

I Used To Smoke Pot Every Time I Played A Video Game. Here's Why I Stopped.

I remember the remainder of my undergraduate college experience through the haze of a thick cloud of pot smoke. In my senior year I lived with a friend who owned a Mac and a copy of Bungie's original first person shooter, Marathon. I had enough doses of sobriety
to compare playing Marathon sober to playing Marathon while I was baked. The difference was pronounced. Ripping a bong hit before I sat down to fight the Pfhor was a no-brainer, and the late-night smoking and NHL sessions with my former roommates continued as well. If I hadn't been a film major with no tests to take and nothing to study in my last year of the program I doubt I'd have graduated.

3D space combat flight sims like the original Wing Commander and X-Wing were responsible for my first, serious steps into PC gaming, but, when Wing Commander III was released, the rig at my parents' house wasn't even close to having the specs I needed to run the game. When I moved back home after college I discovered that my father had purchased a nice PC for his home office and I finally had a rig powerful enough to run WC III.

My heart leapt as I installed the game, overjoyed that I'd get to see my childhood hero Mark Hamill acting in the Wing Commander universe I adored, and then it occurred to me that I could also get really, really high at the same time! Temporarily stripped of responsibilities like schoolwork, classes or a job I'd sleep all day, wake up practically as the sun went down, smoke a few bowls from the one-foot glass bong I'd brought home from Boston and then strap into my virtual starfighter cockpit with breaks to kick the high back in when it started to ebb over the hours and hours of space combat. I was lucky my parents didn't throw me out of the house.

I lost the PC when I moved back to Boston for graduate school, but my new N64 and GoldenEye came with me. All my old college roommates were still in the area and one of them had a big apartment close to our old campus. I'd pack up the console, head over to his place and we'd rip tubes and play GoldenEye multiplayer until dawn. Those nighttime pot and gaming binges had everything to do with why I didn't pass a key course in the curriculum and had to switch to a different program at a different school. I wasted tens of thousands of dollars on college loans to pay for a year of graduate school that I spent getting high and playing GoldenEye.

I wasted tens of thousands of dollars on college loans to pay for a year of graduate school that I spent getting high and playing GoldenEye.

My old roommates gradually left Boston one by one, but I was elated to discover that Lesley, the woman I'd met during my abortive year of graduate school was also a gamer. I traded in some old consoles to get us a PlayStation 1 which was kept at her apartment. We ran through Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil: Nemesis and Metal Gear Solid and I made sure to toke up hard and get good and high before heading over to her place for our marathon gaming sessions. The more cinematic and immersive video games became, the more attractive they were to play while I was stoned out of my mind. The further I pushed the real world away, the further I could step into the virtual worlds that video games offered me.

I began a new graduate program at a different college the following year. Lesley and I also moved in together, which was one of the reasons I finally sought treatment for my mental illness. I couldn't stand watching her get hurt by my impatience, intolerance and verbal cruelty during the bouts of spontaneous anger I suffered. There was no sense denying that something was wrong and I was tired of living with it. Something had to change. But I didn't talk much in therapy about my drug habit, because it didn't seem relevant. At least, that's what I fooled myself into believing, because I had made friends with someone at my new college who lived off a trust fund and spent most of his time smoking pot and playing video games. And he loved ice hockey games.

There was no sense denying that something was wrong and I was tired of living with it. Something had to change.

I skipped classes or spent them practically bouncing in my chair as I waited for class to be over so I could head to my friend's house, get high and play NHL 2000. Lesley would call incessantly to ask when I was coming home, and I'd delay to take that one last bong hit and play one last game of hockey. Lesley and I also began playing EverQuest and massively multiplayer online games turned out to be the most dangerous combination of video games and pot I ever experienced. MMOs are addictive enough without getting any drugs involved, but I would smoke up, get myself into that space where I was high and divorced from the real world and then step into EverQuest's fantasy world of Norrath.

I Used To Smoke Pot Every Time I Played A Video Game. Here's Why I Stopped.

I finished the coursework towards my Masters Degree in two years but not the final project required to graduate from the program which I blew off because I was too busy getting high and playing video games. Things got worse when Grand Theft Auto III came out. The open world insanity of GTA III was a perfect match for the manic ebullience I felt when I was stoned, and never was the chaos of the game funnier than after a bong hit or 12. The trips to my friend's house became longer and longer and the tension with Lesley elevated to new heights of awful.

Star Wars Galaxies was my rock bottom. I'm glad I don't remember all the days I went into work late due to smoking pot and playing Galaxies all night, but I was a role-player in that game and was therefore much deeper into it than I'd ever been into EverQuest. That meant I was even more into smoking while I played. I even allowed the delusions of grandeur that came from my manic highs to inspire me to try founding and running a guild.

Do you know that book about the lessons in management that can be learned by playing World of Warcraft? Imagine a start-up business under the guidance of Rick James as depicted on Chappelle's Show and you understand how my attempt at running a guild went while I was stoned out of my mind.

Getting Help and Getting Better at Games

It was around this time that I began tackling my drug addiction. The volume of pot I was smoking had long since passed ridiculous. Lesley and I almost didn't get married because she was on her last nerve dealing with my addiction and being ignored in favor of video games. I still hadn't finished my Masters Degree. And, the more time I spent in therapy dealing with my bipolar disorder, the more I realized why I was smoking and admitted the futility of trying to cope with my illness that way.

The more time I spent in therapy dealing with my bipolar disorder the more I realized why I was smoking and admitted the futility of trying to cope with my illness that way.

I also came to realize that smoking pot while I played video games actually made the experience worse.

Knights of the Old Republic was my other big Star Wars game in 2003. I was cutting down on smoking by the time the game came out in November. I had plenty of juxtaposition between playing while I was high and playing while I wasn't. Many times I would load up my game, see how I'd built my characters' skills since the last time I'd played or looked at which items my characters had equipped (and I usually sold any items I wasn't actively using). I would wonder what the hell I'd been doing the last time I played. It looked like, while I was high, I'd been experimenting with gear and builds that I'd never use while I was sober. And of course I'd been too stupid to think about saving the game *before* making those kinds of changes, so I was stuck with them.

The original Call of Duty released a month before and immediately eclipsed any other shooters I'd been playing. I couldn't help but take notice of how much easier the game was when I was sober than when I was stoned. Part of that had to do with cranking the difficulty up all the way—I might have been able to play the game successfully while I was high had the difficulty been set to Normal—but it was impossible to get through levels when my reaction times were slowed and my ability to think tactically was fucked.

I Used To Smoke Pot Every Time I Played A Video Game. Here's Why I Stopped.

Playing video games was an excuse to get high, as though I wasn't getting high just for its own sake, like getting high to play video games was healthier or something. The logic was idiotic, and so I finally addressed this aspect of my drug abuse. Realizing that pot was getting in the way of enjoying video games allowed me to break the connection between them. It's no coincidence that shortly afterwards I finally got my act together, finished my final project, and received my Masters Degree.

Playing video games was an excuse to get high.

Even as I understand and admit how badly I abused marijuana and video games I'd be lying if I said that I didn't sometimes miss getting high and gaming when I play Fallout 3 or Skyrim or some other game that presents a world I could lose myself in. It's been 10 years since I conquered this problem, but nostalgia for the idea that smoking enhanced my gaming will probably dog me for the rest of my life if I keep playing video games.

Games and Pot: A Unique Combo For Me

I'd been smoking over that 10 year period. Even if I hadn't been playing video games, because I was self-medicating, I would have smoked. But nothing got me more fired up to get high than playing games. I would smoke up before I went to the movies but I didn't go out of my way to go the movies like I made time for video games. I loved listening to music when I was stoned, but getting high before I played a CD wasn't a necessity. The interactivity of video games made all the difference in how pot altered the experience.

My story should not be taken as a blanket warning about playing video games on drugs, nor as an insinuation that anyone who plays video games while they're high is demonstrating addictive behavior. But spend one night playing Call of Duty: Black Ops II or Halo 4 on Xbox Live and note how many user names include the number 420 or some other pot reference likely spelled out in leetspeak. We take the abundance of pot smokers among core video game players as something normal and somewhere between a joke and an annoyance.

By asking the questions ourselves before outsiders begin doing so we arm ourselves to do a better job of steering those conversations when they begin.

I worry that it's only a matter of time, I think, before the wrong person notices the connection between smoking pot and playing video games and decides to launch studies of their own. And they're going to find xXPuffy420Xx and KinBudKiller waiting for them online. The anti-video game crowd will fashion a noose out of whatever evidence they can by which to hang our industry, at which point the ease with which we can find a plethora of pot smokers playing video games online might not be so funny anymore.

Video games were in no way responsible for my drug habit but the relationship between my getting high and gaming is something I can't ignore, and by the same token I don't think any of us should ignore the reality that video games can be abused. By asking the questions ourselves—before outsiders begin doing so—we arm ourselves to do a better job of steering those conversations when they begin. I think my experience speaks to what I believe is the ultimate truth in regards to how video games affect human beings. They reflect what was already in the player when they sat down and put the controller in their hands, for better or worse.

You can't blame video games for behavior. You have to blame the people playing them or better yet, rather than blaming them, try to understand them. This was my story.

Dennis Scimeca is a freelance writer from Boston, MA who's been published in a number of video game journalism outlets including Ars Technica, Gamasutra and The Escapist. He blogs at punchingsnakes.com and would love to hear your tales of video game debauchery on Twitter: @DennisScimeca.

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Miss Delaware Teen USA Resigns After Porn Video Surfaces

February 26th, 2013Top Story

Miss Delaware Teen USA Resigns After Porn Video Surfaces

By Cord Jefferson

Miss Delaware Teen USA Resigns After Porn Video SurfacesMelissa King, who was crowned Miss Delaware Teen USA in November, reportedly resigned from her post today amid claims that she appeared in a pornographic movie shortly after her 18th birthday last year.

Gawker received an anonymous tip this morning that said a video originally found on the "real amateur girls" website GirlsDoPorn.com (NSFW, obviously) starred King. In the clip, a woman who resembles King says that she turned 18 three months ago—"In March"—before telling an off-camera interviewer that she decided to go into porn because she needed the money. The woman then says she participates in beauty pageants, though she doesn't reveal in which state she competes.

In a brief phone call with Gawker, the Miss Teen Delaware USA Appearance Coordinator, Elaine Paolo, would neither confirm nor deny that King has stepped down, saying she "needed more details." But if it is indeed King in the video, she would have made the GirlsDoPorn.com appearance around the time she won Miss Teen Delaware International 2012, the title she held immediately before winning Miss Teen Delaware USA.

In this video, an excerpt from a documentary about foster care in Delaware, King, having recently been crowned Miss Teen Delaware International, discusses her rise to pageant success after having been a foster kid from age 12 to age 18. King notes that depression and anxiety are common for foster children, adding that financial hardships made just being a normal teenager a struggle for her at times. As Miss Delaware Teen USA, King had vowed to dedicate some of her volunteer efforts to working with other foster children.
Click to view

If her very recent social-media presence is any indication, it would appear that King had an inkling that her past was coming back to bite at her present. She tweeted this three days ago:

[photo via Twitter.]

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