Combining Drives

[SpellowHouse]

Since NVMe's were first introduced, I used multiple drives in PC's. Drive C with my OS, D and E with data and games.

This started because SSD's were quite expensive and drives D and E were mechanical drives, and continued because it was convenient. But, these days, it's not really economical to buy small capacity SSD's for the OS, so I was considering combining drives C and D in to a single 2TB NVMe. Drive D: is already a 2TB 980 Pro, so no need to buy anything. The question (finally!!) is, what is the best way to combine the two drives?

I am about to re-case the PC, so it's a good time to do it. I was thinking that I could start by wiping drive D: then cloning C: to D: using Samsung Magician. Then create a new partition on the drive, name it D:, and copy everything back to D: from my backup. BUT, that is pretty slow because it will take a while to restore that much data.

Drive C: currently has two recovery partitions on it, and I am not sure which one is relevant and not sure whether Samsung Magician will get it right anyway.

How would you achieve this?

 

[SpellowHouse]

Well, that worked perfectly. Thanks all.

D: which used to be the drive is now partitioned in to C: and D: and D: is restoring as I type this.

Magician did well. It actually cloned all the necessary partitions and missed out the out of date recovery partition. Good. It spread C: over the entire drive, so it was necessary to shrink the partition to allow me to create D: Once it is all copied back I will create some free space for the drive to do it's stuff at peak performance.

Part 2 of this is that I have a drive E: which is an old SATA drive which I will now replace with an M.2, but that's for another thread....!