There are five well know volume/partition types in existence. Simple, Spanned, Striped, Mirrored, and RAID-5. Each with their benefits and drawbacks, however, this post will focus on how to create a striped volume in Windows.

I am using Acronis Disk Director 2011 (which I highly recommend) as my partition manager.

The Reason:

One may ask themselves why would I want to create a striped volume, there are different reasons but in my case I wanted to unify my partitions instead of having too many and forgetting which partition has which files as shown below:

So I thought it was a good idea to include both partitions F and G under one drive, I could have gone with a spanned or striped volume. However, considering the differences between both highlighted here I went with a stripped since it offer a higher disk input/output (I/O) performance.

The method

From the diagram below, it seems i don’t have any unallocated space in either F or G

So the first step is to resize both partitions to make enough space to create a striped volume.

1) Resize the partition

1.a) Right click on the partition you want to resize as shown in the figure below and select “Resize Volume”

1.b) You will then enter the amount of space you want unallocated (highlighted in the red rectangle in the figure below), in my case I chose 10 GB since I want the final volume to be 20 GB

1.c) Then click OK

2) Repeat for partition F

3) Create Striped volume

3.a) Right click on the unallocated space you want to create the striped volume on and select “Create volume”

3.b) Select “Striped” as your Volume Type and click Next

3.c) Select the additional disks that will contain your striped volume and click Next

3.d) You should now see the layout of your striped volume (the letter of the partition, the disks that it resides on, file system type, etc… ), if you are happy with this layout you can click “Finish”

4) Finalize your settings

Update 1:

Updated a video tutorial showing how you can create a striped volume on Windows 8, check it out here

————————-

If you found this article useful, don’t forget to share it by clicking one of the buttons below or on the left. You can also share your thoughts in the comments section below.

If you have any problems, questions, or concerns please leave a comment below. You can also follow me on Twitter, add me to your circle on Google+, or like my Facebook page to keep yourself updated and Software reviews.