Two hard drives; only one shows up

Question

Hey,
I've been using my XPS 410 for about two months now, it's been pretty sweet. I haven't had any major problems, but today when I opened up my XPS to try and clean out the fan with compressed air, I noticed something.
Two harddrives! Normally when I open "My Computer" it shows one 250 gig drive. Curious, I pulled them both out, both are 250 GB drives!
Is there anyway I can use them both? 250 GBs is enough for me for now, but 500 would be that much sweeter. Any idea's?
Also, early in December I un-partitioned one of the drives; it was split into one 150 GB drive and one 50 GB one. I don't know it that's important, but what the heck.

Timdrouilard · Answer

A system that physically has two HD's can have them configured three different basic ways   1. The hard drives are left as seperate drives (non-RAID), and will be shown as two drives in Windows.   2. Two drives set up in a RAID 1 array. The drives are 'mirrored'. they are duplicates of each other for safety. If one drive fails, the system continues running with no problems, but the system will report a 'failed' drive and allow you to replace the drive with a new one continuing on safely. In this case, Windows will see them as a single drive with the capacity of one of the drives.   3. Two drives set up in a RAID 0 array. The drives are 'combined'. Windows sees just one drive, but the capacity of the drive in windows is the sum of both drives. This method gives you increased speed since you are writing/reading from both drives, but it does it at the cost of safety. Your data is now spread across both drives. Part of each file will reside on each drive. Because of that, if one drive dies, everything is lost.   It all depends on how you chose your system configuration when you bought the system.   It sounds like you configured your system as a RAID 1 configuration.

Storage, Drives & Media

Two hard drives; only one shows up

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