I have made a previous post a few lines down, but I have made a new one on some information I have recieved. I have 3 hard drives. A 3GB/2GB and a 1GB. I have been told by a friend that the boot drive (The 3GB) can not be raided, but that the other 2 can be although he had never tried this. So, does anybody know how I can software raid the 2GB drive and the 1GB drive in Windows 2000 Professional? I have read on some sites that 3 drives need to be used for a RAID 5, but my friends suggested using RAID 0. This all doesn't really make any sense to me and I would just like the 2 hard drives to appear as a single drive! I am able to backup data to a larger drive and I can also put Windows 2000 Advanced Server on without any problems if I must, although I would prefer not to. All help is deeply appreciated!! Gary

You'll have to decide how you want to handle hard disks and data faults. - ignore them and do file backups - make mirrored copies of data - striped volumes with fault tolerance From windows help: Striped Volumes (Raid 0) A volume that stores data in stripes on two or more physical disks. Data in a striped volume is allocated alternately and evenly (in stripes) to these disks. Striped volumes offer the best performance of all volumes available in Windows 2000, but they do not provide fault tolerance. If a disk in a striped volume fails, the data in the entire volume is lost. You can create striped volumes only on dynamic disks. Striped volumes cannot be mirrored or extended. In Windows NT 4.0, a striped volume was known as a stripe set. Mirrored Volumes (Raid 1) A fault-tolerant volume that duplicates data on two physical disks. It provides data redundancy by using a copy (mirror) of the volume to duplicate the information contained on the volume. The mirror is always located on a different disk. If one of the physical disks fails, the data on the failed disk becomes unavailable, but the system continues to operate using the unaffected disk. A mirrored volume is slower than a RAID-5 volume in read operations but faster in write operations. You can create mirrored volumes only on dynamic disks. In Windows NT 4.0, a mirrored volume was known as a mirror set. Striped Volumes with parity (Raid 5) A fault-tolerant volume with data and parity striped intermittently across three or more physical disks. Parity is a calculated value that is used to reconstruct data after a failure. If a portion of a physical disk fails, you can recreate the data that was on the failed portion from the remaining data and parity. You can create RAID-5 volumes only on dynamic disks, and you cannot mirror or extend RAID-5 volumes. In Windows NT 4.0, a RAID-5 volume was known as a striped set with parity.

You can also create a dynamic disk which will not use raid, but rather span the two disks, making them appear as one drive. This gives no redundancy or speed increases, simply reduces number of drive letters.

also understand that the way this works is one drive will fill up then data will be written to the 2nd drive. High risk for saving a drive letter. Make sure you backup your data to a tape drive so you can recover.

Well I like the suggestion that dwdino mentioned. How do I do this? So the 2 drives will appear as a single drive, data is written to the first one then once full it is written to the second one but still appears as one drive? That would be great!! How do I do it though?