Combine two or more hard disks into a single volume?

I've searched for this, but I'm either getting no answers or a lot of vaguely hard disk related ones, so I'll ask here.

I Have a mac pro with 2 x 160gb, and 2 x 250 gb hard disks. I also have a partition for windows. Running OSX 10.4, parallels and bootcamp. It's on a small home network, where I also have an old G5, with 2 x 80gb disks, running 10.3.

I'm finding the number of volumes shown in finder a little overwhelming now - if I connect to the G5, I have 7 hard disks showing.

So, is there a way to combine hard disks, or partitions on hard disks into single volumes?

I'm thinking to leave the 160 gb system disk as it is, and make a partition or folder on that for data I need to back up.

Then I want to combine 160+250+250 into a single volume. I don't need to back that up, most of it is images of my DVDs as I just use the Mac to watch films, and hide the original DVDs from my highly destructive daughter.

I'd like to combine the 2 x 80gbs on the G5 too, if I can.

Any hints?

There are essentially two ways to combine discs. One is RAID and the second is JBOD. RAID requires all the drives to be the same size (ok fine, you can use different sized drives, but that's just stupid since you'll lose space) but with JBOD you can add all the drives and create one large volume.

Unfortunately, I have no clue as to how to do this (at least, not on a Mac; if it were Windows I'd help you in a jiffy).

Sounds like you don't need fault talerance and you want a spanned volume:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanned_volume

I am not sure all RAID implementations require Concatenation JDOB or SPAN capabilities to economically have all drives be the same size (due to not being able to use the excess space) -- seems like a bad hardware implementation if you lose it for a concatenation function.

However, I am interested to know if anyone has found a software spanning volume utility for Mac? Microsoft has had this feature built-in to Windows XP (and possibly previous versions).

Jasper Smith said:

Sounds like you don't need fault talerance and you want a spanned volume:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanned_volume

I am not sure all RAID implementations require Concatenation JDOB or SPAN capabilities to economically have all drives be the same size (due to not being able to use the excess space) -- seems like a bad hardware implementation if you lose it for a concatenation function.

However, I am interested to know if anyone has found a software spanning volume utility for Mac? Microsoft has had this feature built-in to Windows XP (and possibly previous versions).

Click to expand...

Yeah, it's definitely that rather than mirroring.

Have been doing it woth Windows since NT4.

I shall look around carefully, I don't think it's something I want to experiment with without checking it out first. Losing an 800gb partition would be a bit of a bummer . . .