Combine hard drives to make a MEGA HARD DRIVE? Possible?

I have an external hard drive that I connect to my router and I back up important files to. But I'm reaching the external hard drive's limit of 1 TB. I was wondering if I could combine several external hard drives so they act like one HUGE MEGA DRIVE. :)

I was doing some research on the internet. Looks like you can combine external hard drives in RAID via a NAS but I don't have the money to waste on a NAS. I'm not sure what a spanned volume is but it looks like you'll need a spare operating system to make the drives work together which I don't have.

Can one of you experts just tell me the best way to get this done? It seems something simple.

Is there just a simple way to stack a lot of external hard drives together in an old spare computer case and have them simply act as a one huge external hard drive? So, the cost would only be the external hard drives themselves. For example, get like two 1-Tb hard drive and connect them together with RAID so it's ultra safe?

AddRAM said:

Just buy a new 4TB or 2.

Seagate BarraCuda ST4000DM004 4TB 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb Hard Drives - Newegg.com

I think they're up to like 8 TB now and no RAID to have to contend with. this one if you have an eSATA port https://www.amazon.com/Fantom-Drives...rd+drive&psc=1
And this one if you only have USB https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expan...nal+hard+drive

I use these fantom units they are very reliable and if you still have eSATA port very quick and reliable. I just linked the 8 TB they also come in 1 TB increments I personaly only use 3TB ones as that work well for my back up Scheme

For my notebook, I use a WD Passport Ultra 4 TB for its portability I have had good luck with these WD Passport also but I wouldn't use them on my desktops.

AddRAM said:

An 8TB external hard drive for $150 ????

That`s amazing

Yes for us that remember our first 1 GB hard drives it is amazing how cheap storage has become.

AddRAM said:

An 8TB external hard drive for $150 ????

That`s amazing

I have a 5TB Seagate that i got for $109.99 the one i gave my Dad before he passed now i got it sitting below the Desk waiting to Transfer more goods

Hey guys, I shouldn't have given the simple example of 1 TB drive. I actually have five 4 TB drives in a NAS. It's all filled. It's in RAID so it's not a full 20 TB.

Instead of extending my NAS (which would cost a minimum like $400 extra), I just want to create another 20 TB's with just hard drives. Can this be done? I want the hard drives to look like one single hard drive and be in RAID.

Would I need to use a NAS or an OS? I don't mind the OS since I have an old computer with windows Vista I think but I'm just guessing that perhaps the old OS would slow the hard drive down. Would it?

Making one big drive is known as 'just a bunch of disks'. Many years ago, I made a FreeNas JBOD 4* 1TB as an experiment. It didn't end well. There's no fault tolerance (and no performance gain). One disk went bad, and I lost all the data. If I'd had just 4 separate HDDs in the case (or some version of RAID), it would have been recoverable to some extent.

I didn't know much about computers back then, so if it happened today I might be able to fix it. Either way, I was not a happy bunny.