I currently have a 4TB SN850X SSD that serves as the main OS drive for my Windows workstation. I want to extend my storage to a total of 8TB. My initial plan was to set up a RAID configuration and restore one of my backups (which I take every 6 hours) onto this new RAID drive. However, this method is slow due to the backups being compressed and stored on HDD, meaning it could leave my workstation idle for a day or two while the data gets transferred. I'm looking for a quicker way to extend the logical drive directly to the new 4TB drive in Windows without going through an extensive recovery process.
5 Answers
If you're planning to use RAID, be aware that if you go with RAID 0, losing either of the drives means losing your entire 8TB. That doubles the risk of failure, so keep that in mind!
Honestly, just adding another drive as a separate partition would work fine unless you have a unique need to create a RAID setup. RAID complicates things and might not be worth the hassle.
The quickest and most reliable option involves investing a bit more: remove your current 4TB SSD, put it in a USB4 NVMe enclosure, then install two new 4TB drives and configure them in RAID 0. You can use Clonezilla or another cloning tool to transfer data directly, and this method can speed things up significantly since it's SSD-to-SSD.
Why the downvotes on this discussion? It seems like a solid concern about expanding storage!
If your existing drive isn't the boot drive, you could extend it by using dynamic partitioning. That would be a much quicker option than setting up RAID.
Yeah, that's something I considered, or even using storage pools to manage the drives better.
I do need it to function as one single drive, unfortunately. I guess if nothing else works, I could just get an 8TB drive and mirror the original one.