A striped volume is when you take at least two hard drives that are the exact speed and size and use them as one virtual hard drive. When you save a file to a striped volume your computer saves half of the file on one hard drive and the other half on the other hard drive at the same time. When your computer reads the file it reads from both hard drives at the same time.

A striped volume at least doubles your computer’s hard drive throughput to the striped volume because it’s reading and writing two hard drives at the same time.

A striped volume is great for people who want more speed when playing games, and editing video, pictures, or music. Striped volumes are commonly found in high end gaming computers and servers.

This guide shows you how to take two hard drives that are the exact same size and speed and create a new striped volume out of them in Windows Vista. This striped volume will be in addition to the volume Windows Vista’s installed on.

Create a Striped Volume

1. Install two hard drives that are exactly the same in your computer (in addition to the hard drive Windows Vista’s running on).
2. Right-click Computer in the Start Menu and then select Manage.
3. Click Disk Management in the left column.
4. The two new hard drives should show up in Disk Management. Right-click the first one and then select New Striped Volume.
5. The New Striped Volume Wizard will open. Click Next.
6. Select the available disks (the two you just installed) in the Select Disks page and then click Add to add them to the striped volume.
7. Set the amount of space to use on the stripped volume and then click Next.
8. Give the volume a drive letter and then click Next.
9. Select the formatting options you’d like (use NTFS) and then click Next.
10. Click Finish on the summary page to create the new striped volume.

Using the Striped Volume

Once the striped volume is created it’ll show up as the E: drive for example. If you want to run games off of the new striped volume create a folder called games on the E: drive and chose that folder as the installation path when installing games.

You could also use this volume to store video, music, or pictures you’re editing.

A striped volume is also great for holding databases and web sites on a web server.

Warning

Using a striped volume doubles your chances of data loss. If one of the disks in the striped volume crashes the whole volume crashes and all data is lost.