Quick Scan
You can add erased hard drives to an original to make one big drive.
It's called Concatenated RAID or "Just A Bunch Of Disks" (JBOD).
Use Disk Utility to do it.
Read the directions carefully in the Disk Utility Help Viewer.
Magically Increase Your Disk Size Without Herbs or Pills
UPDATE: This approach can be a terrible idea in certain circumstances!! See end of article to find out why.
It always seems like I will have four impressions of my hard disks over the life time of my Macs:
- So big, when I get a new Mac and nothing has been installed.
- Oh crap, it's full already.
- Time to buy an external hard drive as a band aid until I get a new Mac.
- Laughably small. As in, "Can you believe we ever thought a 500MB hard drive was big??"
"JBOD isn't really RAID at all, but I discuss it here since it is sort of a "third cousin" of RAID... JBOD can be thought of as the opposite of partitioning: while partitioning chops single drives up into smaller logical volumes, JBOD combines drives into larger logical volumes."
So how do you do it? It's surprisingly easy. After hooking up and powering on all your drives, open Disk Utility. The clearest directions are in the Help Viewer for Disk Utility:
- Select one of the disks that you want in the set, and then click RAID.
- Click Add (+), and type a name for the RAID set.
- Choose a format from the Volume Format pop-up menu. Usually you’ll choose the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format.
- Choose Concatenated Disk Set from the RAID Type pop-up menu.
- Drag the disks you want to use to the set.
- Click Create.
Also, don't fool yourself that this is a way of backing up files. Some people think all RAIDs are a way of making backups. In this case, you will still have only version of the file. I recommend your first extra drive purchase be used for Time Machine. But if you have a lot of old smaller hard drives sitting around, maybe you can make them into one larger one and then use that for your backup drive.
Update Continued: I just suffered the downside of this approach by not heeding the advice right above. I went a period of time with not backing up the files on my concatenated RAID and lost my files. This is due to the fact that if one of the disks goes down in the RAID set, they ALL go down and the files are toast. I never expected to not be able to "back out" of the RAID set gracefully.
Now when I say toast, the one way I've found to try to recover them is by using a program called Data Rescue. It can scan the disks that work for files, and recover some, but there is no way to know what percentage has been recovered and what hasn't. And the worst part is none of the file names are recovered, so you get jpeg0001.jpg, then jpeg0002.jpg and so on. I am hopoing to use Spotlight to at least look into the files and pick out some text identifiers to help the recovery process, but for files that Spotlight can't peer into, it's just thousands of unnamed files. Whoo-hoo!
My recommendation now is to only use this type of RAID in a situation where you can afford to lose the files. By tying the disks together this way, you INCREASE the chances it will fail.
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DIG DEEPER
Creating a RAID schemes consisting of several RAID sets (Apple.com)
Choosing a RAID type (Apple.com)
"Just A Bunch Of Disks" (JBOD)
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