Originally Posted by
Squawk7777
My old laptop is slowly dying. It has served me well (almost 10 years), I used it extensively from gaming to slide scanning to Hi8 video restoration. I had to replace a keyboard, battery, power adapter and two of it's three hard drives, one 2.5inch and one SSD (!).
I'd like to use as much as possible from this laptop including both SSD drives. They are mSATA3 format and I'm playing with the idea in putting both in
one external enclosure. Easier said than done, since most items on Amazon or ebay offer space for just one drive. I stumbled across
this on Amazon, but the specs are doing more harm than good. A little excerpt:
Umm... what?
The two SSDs I would like to use in this enclosure are:
* SanDisk SDMSATA512G 512.1 GB
* Samsung SSD 860 EVO mSATA 1TB 1000.2 GB
The question here is if I can use both which are different in size in this enclosure. The next logical question or idea would be whether I can combine both physical drives into one volume.
What are your thoughts?
These could be combined in a NAS type device, which:
- would be much more expensive, and
- a very bad idea...
NAS options permit keeping multiple drives as independent volumes, or combining in various forms of RAID.
The short version:
- With two drives, you would only have two options, RAID-1 (mirroring) & RAID-0 (striping).
- With drives of different sizes, you are effectively limited to the smaller of the two sizes
- With RAID-1, you would get only 500 GB of storage, but you would achieve redundancy in case of a single drive failure.
- With RAID-0, you would get 1TB of storage (500 GB on each drive), better performance, and in the event of a single drive failure - lose all data.
Good luck.