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How to Set Up Drive Spanning in Windows

· 2 min read

Drive spanning (also known as a spanned volume) allows you to combine unallocated space from multiple physical disks into a single logical volume. This is useful when you want a single large drive letter that spans across multiple disks, without the redundancy overhead of RAID.

Warning: Make sure you have no important data on the partitions you plan to use, as creating a spanned volume will erase everything on them. Spanned volumes do not provide any fault tolerance — if one disk in the span fails, all data on the volume is lost.

How to create a spanned volume​

  1. Open Disk Management (right-click the Start button or search for diskmgmt.msc).
  2. Right-click on unallocated space on one of your disks.
  3. Click New Spanned Volume (or Create New Volume on older Windows versions).
  4. Click Next.
  5. Select Spanned Volume and click Next.
  6. Select the additional disks you want to include and click Add.
  7. Adjust the size settings if needed, then click Next.
  8. Assign a drive letter (for example, G:).
  9. Choose your formatting options — NTFS is recommended for most use cases.
  10. Click Next, then Finish.

Windows will create the spanned volume and it will appear as a single drive in File Explorer.

When to use drive spanning​

  • You have multiple smaller disks and want to use them as one large volume.
  • You need temporary storage and do not require redundancy.
  • You are combining remaining free space across disks for a non-critical purpose.

When not to use drive spanning​

  • For important data — use mirrored volumes (RAID 1) or a proper RAID array instead.
  • In production server environments — use Windows Storage Spaces or hardware RAID for better reliability.