# Adding Second Hard Drive

## Pinbin

I only had 4GB Hard Drive to begin with and am getting close to running out of space so I was going to pop in a second drive probably about the same size that I have laying around.  My question is, is there a way to configure it so that the drives are "spanned", if that makes sense.  So that instead of one volume that is about 3GB and another that is 4GB to just have one volume that is 7GM.

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## delta407

You can set up software RAID to span (hd0 with hd1 tacked onto the end) or stripe (alternating hd0/hd1, gives better performance) your two hard drives, though if they're different sizes it isn't really all that fun.

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## fghellar

I think LVM is what you want: http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO.html.

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## Pinbin

Thank you, yes LVM looks like exactly what I am looking for.  Found this post in the documentation section once I knew what to look for that was a great help as well.

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=1897

Now all the posts I have seen or found so far, are on how to setup LVM before you setup Gentoo, does anyone have information on setting it up after I have installed Gentoo, I don't want to have to reinstall it again, if I don't have to.

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