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I have a huge collection of videos I am using for a book. I have over 30TB of data. When I am searching for and downloading new videos for my research, it is a huge benefit for me if I do not download the same videos over and over. So, I use YouTube's download and playlist functions which tells me if a specific video is already on the playlist or any of my playlists, if so, I don't add it and don't subsequently download it. The problem arises when I reach my hard drive's limit. The solution is to download them all to a single hard drive and then I receive a warning if the video has the same name as another already on the hard drive.

So, if I can create a single, 30TB virtual hard drive, out of three 10TB drives, it would make my life simpler.

However, that still leaves a huge problem I have not yet figured out how to solve. These days, unscrupulous YouTubers copy older videos and use a different title, different description, different thumbnail, etc. and then all I have is my memory and the time it takes to watch every single video, sometimes twice, to discern whether it is a copy of a video I already have.

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    To answer your question, people will require more information. What operating system are you using? You tagged external-hard-drive, are these 3 seperate external drives? Do you want to merge the volumes or is it possible to start with 3 empty discs ?
    – Silbee
    Commented Jun 28 at 8:15
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    What OS? the approaches would vary depending on that and how much redundancy you need
    – Journeyman Geek ♦
    Commented Jun 28 at 11:19
  • Regarding the hardware, you can buy a RAID controller that you can plug many drives into. If it has SFF-8086 or similiar you can easily get 4 SATA drives per physical plug. Want more? You can get SAS expanders.
    – cybernard
    Commented Jun 28 at 16:08

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You can link three drives into one virtual drive by setting them up as a RAID 0 array. However, be aware that a RAID 0 array has no redundancy. It spreads the data across all of the drives. This results in faster speeds for HDDs, but also puts your data at risk. If one drive fails, you will likely lose data from all three drives.

Another less flexible but safer alternative is to mount the drives as folders. For example, mount drive A as C:\Videos\One and drive B as C:\Videos\Two . This is likely not what you want, since you still have to be aware of how much space is available on each drive. However, it is less likely to result in data loss.

A much safer alternative is a RAID 5 array, which uses both striping and redundancy. It allows you to recover your data if one of the drives fails. However, it will not give you a full 30 TB.

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https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/storage/adaptec-smartraid-raid-adapters

For example here: RAID controller

Each connector of the 6 black connectors you see here supports 4 SATA devices, as this will allow you to have plenty of expansion in the future.

Choices

So the trade off is cost, but you can use a RAID controller in RAID 5 or even better yet RAID 6 mode with a minimum of 4 drives.

However, all the drives will appear to your OS as a single storage entity. Even if you add more drives it will still appear as 1 drive.

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Windows 10 and Windows 11 have a built-in feature called Storage Spaces. It is a virtual raid-like system. You plug in the drives and then add them to a pool and set up a volume on it.

I think performance is not as good as an actual hardware raid. Your motherboard may already support raid as well. Check the manual.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/storage-spaces-in-windows-b6c8b540-b8d8-fb8a-e7ab-4a75ba11f9f2

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