Multiple hard drive hookup...HELP PLZ

[DMKA]

Ok, I have heard of people having more than one HD hooked up in their comp, functioning as one (example: a 20GB hd and a 10GB hd= 30GB), and well....

I currently have a 20GB hard drive in my computer, but I have a spare 30GB one and I was wondering how and if I can actually do this, so I can then have 50GB...

Can anyone help me?

[Baloki]

I know you can have 2 in the same computer but they come up as seperate drives in Windows. Like C:, D:, etc

I don't know how you can have then count as one drive though.

[crono_logical]

If they were both identical makes of drive (same manufacturer, same disk space, same spindle speed etc.), you could do it with a RAID controller. Or if you have at least two physical disks, then you can use WinXP's dynamic disk format instead of the normal way of formatting disks to make a drive span across multiple physical disks - in this case though, you can't use the physical disk WinXP is installed on to do this (so you'll now need at least 3 physical disks), but the disks can be different as you don't have to have identical disks to do this.

Simplest (and probably cheapest) way is to do as Baloki says though and just give them seperate letters per physical disks rather than make a partition across multiple disks :p I suppose if you have WinXP again, and if the Windows partition is formatted with NTFS, you can mount the second drive under a folder on the Windows partition instead of a letter much like how you mount file systems in linux, so everything looks like it's on one drive, but to explicitly put something on the second disk, you have to put the files in the mounted folder.

[DMKA]

Oh, if they show up as 2 different drives thats fine. As long as I have the additional space, thats all I care about.

I just don't know how I have to hook it up. :confused:

Oh I have Windows ME btw.

[Endless]

Chances are all you have to do is to set the jumpers for your hd as "slave", then install it in your case, find the cable that goes to your primary hd, plug that cable (there are three plugs: one goes in the motherboard, the other two in drives) in your drive, plug the power cable to your hd.

[Peegee]

Also, your C drive might need to be set as 'master with slave present' or something. Consult your hard drive manual or online manual. Or tell us what make/model hard drives you have.

[Baloki]

Or you know to make life easy you could just like leave it on cable select and never have to figure out what a jumper is?