Combining 2 HDs?

I had this on my my older PC, but can't remember for the life of me how I did it. I'm trying to combine 2 identical Western Digital 80GB hard drives to come up with a single 160GB section. This is on a Dell 3000 PIV (eh, Celeron, actually ). Would I just put the jumper pin on the Master pins on both drives? Also, I just noticed when I ran Belarc that I don't have the WD drive in, but the OEM Samsung 80GB. Would that make a difference?

And, for a second, off-topic question, I'm downloading some files, and keep getting errors on some of them, and they're leaving a ".dusd" file behind. What the hell is ".dusd"

Thanks in advance for the info.

 

Well, in order to 'combine' 2 hard drives, you'd need to setup some type of RAID 0 system. There are 2 ways to do it. Software RAID, meaning you don't need any additional hardware, or Hardware RAID, where you need to install a RAID card in your computer. Here is an explanation of how to setup software RAID through Windows XP. (It should be the same, or at least very similar, if you're using Windows 2000)

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=830&page=5

There are some downsides to doing this. The first, and arguably most important one that comes to mind is the fact that you cut the reliability of your data in half. If one of the drives fails, you will lose the data on both drives. And depending on what you use your computer for, you may not notice any performance increase. Therefore, if you want to do this solely for simplicity, I would advise against it.

As for the .dusd files, I have no idea, and a google search came up with nothing.

Also, as an FYI, the common notation for a Pentium 4 is P4 rather than PIV. Intel stopped with the roman numerals at the PIIIs.

 

To Convert to Dynamic (per the link) you have to have XP Pro (Home only supports Basic). You would then have your choice to of a Spanned Drive or Stripped Drive.

Personnaly I think its a bad idea because if you were to loose either drive... ALL DATA IS LOST.