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On my Thinkpad laptop, I have a 1TB SSD (main computer's drive):

C:\  ~200 GB   (system)
D:\  ~800 GB   (documents)

I'm about to add a second internal 1TB SSD (buying a 2TB SSD is currently not an option), but instead of having it as:

E:\  ~1000 GB  (documents)

and having constantly to think "Should I put these documents in D: or E: ?", etc., I'd like to have something like:

C:\  ~200 GB   (system)     (SSD1)
D:\  ~1800 GB  (documents)  (SSD1 + SSD2)

so I won't have to think about splitting my documents in different places.

How to do this with Windows 7?

Should I use a NTFS junction (how?) or something related to NTFS mount points or virtual folder or NTFS symbolic links?

NB: I have a T520 Thinkpad laptop, so I don't think I have RAID or such things. Second SSD will be in the bay that replaces the CD-ROM.

Basj
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2 Answers2

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Mount points are possible – but they have the same limitations as drive letters. You will have D: that's one disk, and D:\Stuff as another disk, but you cannot "interleave" everything into a single list, and you run out of space in one disk, it won't automatically expand to another.

Junctions are slightly more flexible as they don't have to point to the root of a disk; they can point to subfolders – so it's possible to have multiple. You'll still have two independent disks, but e.g. you can arrange that D:\Video\Movies\Old and D:\Games\Foobar both point to different parts of disk E:.

So instead, what you're looking for is some form of logical volume management. Windows has two built-in in features for this: "Dynamic disks" (available through diskmgmt.msc since Win2000) and "Storage spaces" (available since Win8.1). Both allow you to expand a volume across multiple disks, as well as implement a few RAID types.

Side note: RAID doesn't have to be hardware-based. Indeed many consumer-grade motherboards have "fake RAID" which is implemented entirely within the Windows driver. Dedicated software RAID implementations, such as mdraid on Linux, may even work more reliably than hardware controllers. But in this case you don't need RAID (and cannot really use it due to differently sized disks), you only need a plain 'JBOD' mode.

Overall I've heard more good things about Storage Spaces. Unfortunately it is not available for Win7 and in any case requires a whole disk – you couldn't use D: as part of a Space while keeping C: intact, and Windows cannot boot from a Space either.

So you're left with "Dynamic disks". The diskmgmt.msc tool allows converting a regular MBR/GPT disk to this format non-destructively, after that you could delete E: and "expand" D: into the newly available empty area.

(However, while I know that this feature exists, I haven't used it in practice and only heard poor descriptions of its performance, so I'll stop short of recommending it.)

grawity
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As pointed in the comments, it is not possible directly with Windows 7.

After doing some research, here is a workaround with mklink /d.

C:\     200 GB
D:\     800 GB
    D:\documents\
    D:\work\
    D:\photos\   [symbolic link]
    D:\video\    [symbolic link]
    D:\music\    [symbolic link]
E:\     1000 GB
    E:\photos\
    E:\video\
    E:\music\

Some folders are physically on E:, but they are all viewable from D:, and they appear for most applications as if they were really on D:.

For example, when making a backup of D: with SyncBack backuping tool, it will follow the symbolic links, and backup everything.

For most applications, I can think as if I only had a D:.

It's even possible to hide E: from the "Computer" Explorer view.

enter image description here

Basj
  • 2,143