I have six old SATA ssd of different sizes and brands (100 to 512 GB) collecting dust in a drawer. I would like to put them into my PC as one large JBOD volume, and use this for installing Steam games.
Speed is not important. Data redundancy is not important. How do I combine these disks in Windows so they show up as one drive, without losing space on the larger drives?
Thanks.
Assuming your motherboard doesn't actually have a RAID controller that you're willing to use (Also because you would have to be using it already or if you switch to it, you will be reinstalling windows).
Now, Connect all drives in your computer, and windows should see all of them in the Disk management utility. Convert all the SSD's into dynamic disks, and delete all partitions.
Now, create one partition and select all your SSD's and it will allow you to create a mirrored or striped partition as if it was using a RAID controller spanning all selected disks.
Sidenote: as long as you go from windows install to windows install and all these drives are connected to the motherboard the same, you will not lose any data and the dynamic disk remains functional. I'm actually fairly sure that if you were to swap 2 SSD's ports, the disks would go offline, but you would be able to select the right disks again to get the array working again.
Another sidenote: Dynamic disks are not regular partitions. Other OSses such as linux will not be able to do anything with them. Keep that in mind. Once Windows is inaccessible, if you cannot get into another windows, the data is gone.
