Once selected, click Next to continue.ĭuring the format volume step, select Format this volume with the following settings. In the next step, select Assign the following drive letter, click the drop-down menu and select a drive letter you want to assign to this new volume. Step 5: Assigned a drive letter and format the volume Once all the disks you want to combined are added to the right column, click Next to continue. In the New Spanned Volume wizard, select the disk you want to merge from the left column and click Add to add it to the “Selected” column. To merge two or more drives in Windows 11, in Disk Management, right-click the unallocated space of one of the drives you want to combine, then select New Spanned Volume or New Striped Volume depending on which one you have decided to use. In the example below, I will use Spanned volume because I want to merge 111 GB of unallocated space from Disk 0 with 30 GB of unallocated space from Disk 1. On a Stripped volume, data can be written across all combined drives, which results in better performance than Spanned volume. If a partition has a different size than another when creating a Striped volume, the lowest size space will be used.įor example, if drive A has an unallocated space of 20 GB while Drive B has only 15 GB, when creating a Striped volume, the tool will take only 15 GB from Drive A and merge it with 15 GB from Drive B. Striped volume can only merge partitions with the same size. If you have two or more drives with unallocated partitions of the same size, you should use Striped volume instead. On a Spanned volume, data will only be written on the second drive when the first drive is full. You should use Spanned volume to combine two or more unallocated partitions if these partitions have different sizes. In Windows 11, both of the two features – Spanned and Striped volumes, offer similar functionality, which is to combine and merge partitions from two or more drives. Now you need to choose what kind of volume you should create – Spanned or Stripped volume. Step 3: Create New Spanned or Striped Volume Make sure you know what you are doing before clicking the Delete Volume option. All data on the volume will be permanently deleted. Warning: Deleting a volume means to completely wipe the volume. Follow the instructions (step 1 to 3) in this post: How to split drive in Windows 11, to split and create unallocated space out of an existing volume.Ĭase scenario 4: If your drive already has an existing volume with no unallocated space left and that you no longer need the volume (if you don’t mind deleting all data in this volume) and wish to include it into the new merged volume, you need to delete the volume first. Once the disk is initialized, the disk space will turn into Unallocated.Ĭase scenario 3: If you just want to make use of the unused space of your drives that hasn’t already turned into unallocated space (meaning the empty space is still on an already existing volume), you can shrink the volume to squeeze some disk space out to be unallocated space. If your drives already have unallocated disk space ready to be merged, proceed to step 2.Ĭase scenario 2: If your drive is brand new, you need to first initialize the disk by right-clicking the disk in the disk management tool and select Initialize. An unallocated space is a partition of a disk marked as “ Unallocated” that isn’t assigned to a partition. Step 2: Prepare the “Unallocated” disk spaceĬase scenario 1: The first condition for creating any volume is the drive has to have unallocated disk space ready to be used. In Windows 11, click Start, search for and open “ Disk Management“. How to combine two different drives in Windows 11 Step 1: Open Disk Management tool Step 6: Confirm the conversion of drive from basic to dynamic.Step 5: Assigned a drive letter and format the volume.Step 3: Create New Spanned or Striped Volume.Step 2: Prepare the “Unallocated” disk space.How to combine two different drives in Windows 11.
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