How to use Storage Spaces in Windows 10

Windows 10 is an operating system that delivers a lot of new features and improvements, including a new breed of apps that run across devices, a new web browser built for the modern web, a unified Store, improvements on security, and an updated, but yet familiar user interface.
The operating system also includes many familiar features found in Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. One of these features is Storage Spaces. This feature was originally introduced in Windows 8.x and let you group different types of drives, such as traditional rotating platters hard drives and Solid State Drives into a single storage pool, which then you can use to create "storage spaces".
What are Storage Spaces?
Storage Spaces are technically virtual drives that appear in File Explorer as normal local storage, and each storage space you create can be less, equal, or greater to the amount of the physical capacity available in the storage pool.
Storage Spaces support some drive technologies, including ATA, SATA, SAS and USB drives. Getting started with the feature only requires one or more drives, in addition to the drive where you have Windows installed.
You don't even have to use all the available drives to create storage spaces. For example, if you have three drives of 100GB each, you could only use two to create a "storage pool". Once you have a new pool, you can create a 200GB virtual drive that represents the total amount of space available, or you can provision and create a 1000GB virtual drive (storage space).
Of course, if you have a storage space of 1000GB that was created in a pool with 200GB of available physical storage, you can only store 200GB worth of data. However, as the drives begin to fill up, you will be notified to add more drives to accommodate more available space.
Also, you're not limited to one storage space per storage pool; you can create as many spaces as allowed by the available space. Let me explain. While you can create storage spaces of virtually any size, each time you create a new virtual drive, you will be using a small portion of the physically available storage, and eventually, you will run out of space as you keep creating more storage spaces.
Why Storage Spaces?
Although, there are not many scenarios where everyday users will be using this feature, "Storage Spaces" has numerous benefits. For example, you can use storage spaces to create a large network drive instead of sharing multiple drives in your network, which is cleaner and more efficient.
If you have different USB drives that you can connect to your computer to save your data, you can combine the drives into a single logical drive, which enables you to organize all your data in a single place -- and no more asking yourself: "In which drive did I save those photos?"
Perhaps the most important aspect of Storage Spaces isn't the ability to group different drive technologies with different sizes, but the ability to configure different types of data protection.
Resiliency
Storage Spaces supports four types of resiliency:
- Simple: A simple storage space writes one copy of your data and does not protect you from driver failures. This option requires, at least, one drive, and each new additional drive adds another point of failure.
- Two-way mirror: This option writes two copies of your data on the drives, which can protect your data from a single driver failure. Two-way mirror requires a least two drives.
- Three-way mirror: This option works similar to the two-way mirror, but it writes three copies of your data on the drives, which will help you to protect your data from two simultaneous drive failures. Three-way mirror requires, at least, three drives.
- Parity: Similar to the standard RAID 5 technology, Parity for a storage space writes your data with parity information on the available driver to help you protect your data from a single driver failure. This option requires a least three drivers.
The resiliency type you need will mainly depend on what you're trying to accomplish. If you're only interested in available space and drive speed, you could use the "Simple (no resiliency)" option. If you want to protect your data from drive failure, you can go with one of the two mirror types, but remember that the more copies of your data get written to disk, it will consume more storage. If you like a balance of available space and speed, then you should use the "Parity" option.
Here's something else to keep in mind. You can always make a storage space larger, but you cannot make the available space smaller. Every time you make a change it will cost you a quarter of a gigabyte of the available physical space, as such, you should plan in advance how large you want to make the storage space. Currently, the operating system allows a maximum of 63TB per storage space.
How to setup Storage Spaces
Now that you have a little background on Storage Spaces for Windows, below we'll go through how to use and manage the feature.
How to create a storage pool and storage space
1- Connect all the drives you want to participate on Storage Spaces.
2- Open Start, do a search and open Storage Spaces.
3- Click the link Create a new pool and storage space.
4- Select the drives you want to be part of the pool and click Create Pool. It's important to note that all the data currently on the drives will be erased during the process.
5- Now, it's the time to create the storage space (virtual drive), choose a descriptive name, as it will get confusing if you don't. Then choose the drive letter and file system -- for most people NTFS will be fine, but you always REFS (Resilient File System).aspx){.nofollow}, which is a new "local file system. It maximizes data availability, despite errors that would historically cause data loss or downtime. Data integrity ensures that business-critical data is protected from errors and available when needed."
6- Pick the resiliency type you want to use for this particular storage space.
7- Select the size you want to allocate. Remember that you can pick any size you want. It doesn't matter if you don't have the available physical space as you will get an alert when it's time to add more storage.
8- Click the Create storage space button to complete the process.
Now that you have created the storage space, in "Manage Storage Spaces" you can now view some useful information, such as physical storage usage, information about the storage space and from the participating physical drives.
How to create multiple storage spaces
1- If you want to create a second storage space, open Start, do a search and open Storage Spaces.
2- Click the Create a storage space link under the storage pool.
3- Choose your preferences (remember to pick a descriptive name).
4- Click the Create storage space button to complete the process (refer to the previous image).
How to add new drives to a storage pool
At any time, you can always add more drives to the pool to expand a storage space -- just follow the steps below:
1- While in "Manage Storage Spaces" click the Add drives from the storage pool.
2- The available drives you can add will appear, select the one you want, and click the Add drives button. You will also notice the Optimize drive usage to spread existing data across all drives, make sure this option is enabled as well.
How to change the size of a storage space
1- Open Start, do a search and open Storage Spaces.
2- Under the storage space you want to modify, click the Change option.
3- From this page, you can change the name of the "space", drive letter, and size. Make your changes, and click the Change storage space button to complete the process.
How to optimize drive usage
While "Storage Spaces" remains pretty much unchanged since Windows 8.1, Microsoft is adding a new feature to optimize drive usage in Windows 10. This feature is useful when you add new drives to an existing pool, as it will move some data to the newly added drive to better utilize the drives in the pool and capacity.
The optimization happens by default when you add a new drive to an existing pool, when you select the Optimize drive usage to spread existing data across all drives option. However, if you didn't check the option or drives were added before upgrading the pool, you need to perform an optimization manually.
1- While in Storage Spaces click the Optimize drive usage from the storage pool.
2- Click the Optimize drive usage button. Keep in mind that this process in intensive, as such you may notice your PC being slow for a while.
How to properly remove a drive in use
When you have a Storage Space configured, you cannot just disconnect a drive out of the blue, as it may cause data loss and other problems.
Fortunately, Windows 10 includes a mechanism to remove a drive properly from a pool, by moving the data on that drive other drives in the pool, and then you can disconnect the drive from your computer, or you can use to store something else.
Follow the step below to remove a drive from a pool:
1- Open Start, do a search and open Storage Spaces.
2- On the storage pool expand Physical drives.
3- Click the Prepare for removal option.
4- Make you're removing the correct drive and then click the Prepare for removal button.
5- Once again locate the drive you want to remove and click the Remove button (refer to the image in step number three).
6- Finally, click the Remove drive button to complete the process.
It's important to note that after you remove the drive, it won't be accessible through File Explorer. You'll need to open Disk Management and reformat the drive in question.
1- Simply, right-click the Start button, and click Disk Management, locate the drive with the "Unallocated" label.
2- Right-click the drive, select New Simple Volume and follow the on-screen instructions to format the drive using NTFS file system and performing a quick format.
Now the removed drive should be usable again.
How to delete a Storage Space
If you no longer need a storage space, you can easily delete it. Simply follow the steps below:
1- Open Start, do a search and open Storage Spaces.
2- Under "Storage Spaces" click the Delete option next to the "space" you no longer need. It's important to note that that deleting a storage space permanently deletes the data it contains. The only way to recover is by using a previously made backup.
3- Once you're ready, click the Delete storage space.
How to delete a Storage Pool
You cannot delete a storage pool that contains a storage space. You first need to remove all the storage spaces created in a pool properly. Only then the option to delete the pool will be available.
1- Open Start, do a search and open Storage Spaces.
2- Click the Delete pool on the storage pool you want to remove.
3- Then click the Delete pool to complete the process.
Once you delete the pool, the participating drive will be reinstated to your system, but again, as I have mentioned in the steps, the drives won't be visible in File Explorer until you manually reformat each drive through Disk Management.
Additional information
- Once set, you cannot change the storage space resiliency or file system.
- Yes, you can add more drives and upgrade a storage space on-demand without disrupting access and affecting data already in the "space".
- At any time, you can rename a pool or space.
- Storage Spaces is available in Windows 10 Pro and Windows 10 Home.
- The drive has to be around 5GB of size to be available in Storage Spaces.
Wrapping things up
By now, you should be able to use and manage Storage Spaces in Windows 10. If it was a bit confusing, just remember that with Storage Spaces for Windows, you can create one or more pools with the available drives on your system. In each pool, you can create one or more storage spaces (a virtual drive) of any size as available storage. You can always add more drives and upgrade the space as necessary.
Note: If all the options appear grayed out after creating a Storage Space, this is because you need Administrator Rights. To enable this feature simply click the Change settings button in the top-right corner of the settings page.
More resources
If you want to read more about Windows 10, make sure you check these resources:
- Windows 10 on Windows Central – All you need to know
- Windows 10 help, tips, and tricks
Do you use Storage Spaces in Windows 10? What's the primary reason you use the feature? Tell us your story in the comments below.
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Mauro Huculak is technical writer for WindowsCentral.com. His primary focus is to write comprehensive how-tos to help users get the most out of Windows 10 and its many related technologies. He has an IT background with professional certifications from Microsoft, Cisco, and CompTIA, and he's a recognized member of the Microsoft MVP community.
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Now this is an article Thanks guys
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ok have trick question, how do I set my 1TB of OneDrive space a a network drive? Seems basic, this was avaliable in 8.1 because you coud designatethe use of files online only but this was removed in W10. I have mapped he drive however the mapping keeps dropping any time I rebot. Using Surface Pro 3.
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You can't include mapped or network drives in a storage pool.
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If you know how to map the drive, then just create a script to map the drive, and set it to run when you log on.
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Yeah didn't know about this at all
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I'm glad you guys like it. Thanks, Mauro
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Can I trick OneDrive to install on an sd card with this?
Of topic a bit, how come my SD card always make the inserted sound when I open my laptop from sleep, and then displays the explorer of it, even though AutoPlay is off? -
Thanks Mauro, good read. Does it seem like a good alternative to a Windows Home Server?
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Wegotserved.com
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Very informative. Mauro for CTO.
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Thank you. I didn't know about this.
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Next article should be Storage Spaces vs Raid Performance. I've been really interested in storage spaces in the past, but everyone has always told me that the performance is substantially sub par.
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Raid is done at a hardware / bios level from what I understand so it will definitely give greater performance, but you also loose a lot of flexibility with raid.
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RAID is done at BOTH the hardware and software level depending on if you have a raid controller or via OS. Flexiblilty is base on what raid level you choose and the type of file system. **** just run JBOD and the Zettabyte File System (ZFS) and you will not have to worry about data loss I/O throughput, just keep adding more disks to the pool the name shows the data storage limits!!!
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I tried having a RAID 1 of 2 HDD next to my SSD. My BIOS does not allow for this. So, I am using storage spaces again.
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If you're using a mirror, the performance is basically the same either way -- RAID and Storage Spaces will basically go as fast as the slowest drive will let you go, with very little overhead. In this case, Storage Spaces is the clear winner because of the added flexibility of being able to swap drives in and out to add capacity. If Windows 10 performs like Windows 8, when using parity, write speeds in Storage Spaces is significantly slower, and much slower than a real Raid5. You still get the flexibility, and read speeds are fine, but write speeds top out at like 50 MB/s. Storage is so cheap these days that you should probably just avoid this mode.
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That might be right, but I think the mirroring process must imply a performance hit with Storage Spaces compared with RAID. BIOS-based RAID mirrors in the background with zero CPU and system usage, beyond the load on the applicable bus' bandwidth. I am not entirely clear on how Storage Spaces work in the background, but as a software-based solution, I assume it uses the CPU and at least some system resources to handle the mirroring. Now, even if all of that is correct, it's possible that the amount of system resources consumed by Storage Spaces is so small as to be negligible. On that, I confess I just don't know. Another huge performance advantage of RAID over Storage Spaces is that it can be your boot and OS drive, which is where nearly all of your perceivable performance comes from -- DLL access and virtual memory for the pagefile. I currently run RAID5 on 3 ~500GB SSD drives. That means I have 1TB of fast SSD storage and full data protection (any drive can fail and I can keep working until I replace the failed SSD), for much less than the cost of 2 1TB SSD's and RAID1 mirroring. This also provides superior read performance over RAID1, because of the data striping, but no better write performance (possibly slightly worse write performance, not entirely sure). Still, for faster reading, full data protection, and lower cost than alternatives, I'd recommend this configuration. By the way, this is just using the stock RAID controller on the motherboard (Skylake CPU and associated 100 series chipset). The next big performance gain will come from switching from SATA drives to M2 drives. SATA was designed for high-latency hard drives, and is significant bottleneck for modern high speed SSDs. However, as of a month ago, you could only get M2 SSD drives up to 500GB. On my motherboard, there are only 2 M2 ports, so for any data protection, that would have been RAID1 for a max capacity of 500GB. For just a bit more money, albeit on the slower SATA bus, I have 1TB of storage. But when I can shift to RAID1 with 2 1TB (or larger) M2 SSDs for a reasonable price, that would provide a major performance gain.
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Modern CPU's are so fast that there's basically no CPU overhead for mirroring. According this this guy, Storage Spaces is actually faster than hardware RAID, but it could just be something particular to his test setup. http://betanews.com/2014/01/15/windows-storage-spaces-and-refs-is-it-tim... The same cannot be said for Parity mode, however. Whatever method Microsoft is using to calculate the checksums (similar to how RAID-5 works) is super slow, based on all the comparisons I've seen. There is one critical flaw in your setup; you still have to back it up. If your motherboard dies (and takes the RAID controller with it), you could have a tough time getting another system to recognize your RAID volume. Since you're using Intel motherboard RAID, maybe that's not as difficult as if you were using a real hardware RAID controller. But with Storage Spaces, you just plug the drives into any Windows system and you're back in business. If you really care about maximum performance, then RAID-0 is the way to go. RAID-0 is risky, but as long as you've got good backups (which are a must, even with RAID-5), there's no reason not to go all out with RAID-0.
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@Mike, great information. Actually no flaw in my system, just didn't disclose my full configuration, because the rest of my system is not broadly applicable. I run a multi-system network with a Windows Server for our family (yes, that's weird, I know). All of our documents are actually hosted on the server via Redirected Files, and then run locally for full performance via Offline Files. Dual Windows Servers mirror files between them via a DFS replica, and each server runs RAID1. So to lose data, I'd need to simultaneously lose my RAID5 workstation, both RAID1 servers, and my laptop. All of which run RAID configurations except for the convertible laptop/tablet (obviously). RAID0 is faster on any given bus, but nowhere near as fast as even RAID1 on the M2 bus (assuming fast SSDs so that the bus, rather than the SSD is the bottleneck). Also, from a reliability standpoint, I would never use RAID0, until MTBF on SSD drives reaches something like 30 years and are generally less likely to fail than MOBO or other critical hardware. The relatively modest performance gains just aren't worth the risk of downtime. I much prefer RAID redundancy, because they mean no downtime. I can swap a failed drive when I can work it into my schedule, rather than stop work to rebuild a system or restore from a backup.
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Definitely seems like overkill, but I certainly admire your dedication! Obviously Storage Spaces is not a technology aimed at people for whom cost is no object, but you could still find a use for it, even in your setup. If your storage needs grow, the ability to add capacity by simply plugging in another drive is handy. Over time, smaller drives can age out of the system and be replaced with newer, bigger drives, without having to add another drive letter to system and shift data from one place to another. Also, ReFS could be a boon for data integrity as well. My system is like the polar opposite of yours. You have stuff to manage. I have a old system that runs Stablebit Drivepool (Storage Spaces was just a little too basic at the time that I put the system together, and still is), and it has like 8 plain old drives in it, no RAID at all, just one massive pool. The data that I absolutely cannot afford to lose gets mirrored to 4 drives, nightly backup of my desktop/laptop/media-center PC's and less critical stuff goes to 2 drives, and, and there's even a place for stuff that doesn't need any replication because it exists somewhere else. Currently, I don't use RAID-1 or 5 for my boot drives. I probably should, but it's not that hard to restore from a backup image if a system drive were to fail. If my storage server were to die, I could have Drivepool with all my data, exactly as it was, up an running on another system in an hour.
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Hi Mike, Regarding your statement: "But with Storage Spaces, you just plug the drives into any Windows system and you're back in business." I've been reading a lot about the features of Storage Space, but not a lot about multi-year data planning. Everything fails eventually. I'm just recovering from a PSU failure which is a easy fix, but I'm thinking about motherboard failure. I had a motherboard failure using hardward RAID a buch of years ago and you are right, it was impossible to ever get that RAID back. There I was making the trade off between fast drives in a RAID 0 and a much larger but slower back up drive. So is it really as simple as, build a new system, install the OS, move over all the Storage Space drives reboot and it comes back to life? Regards Mark
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Yeah, it's that easy. Technically, you don't even have to reboot if your motherboard has hot-pluggable SATA ports, or your Storage Space is on USB.
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Thanks
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Quite funny that the think OneDrive file placeholders are too complicated and yet they leave this in lol, while I love this feature and have used it on occasion, it's very confusing to normal users
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I'm not defending the decision to drop placeholders (which are not hard to figure out), but understand the target audience for such a feature. Microsoft wants everyone, even normal people, to use OneDrive. Storage Spaces, on the other hand, are not something that everyone needs. It's a feature for advanced users, or people who manage servers. It doesn't need to be simple the way that OneDrive needs to be simple. (But there was still no good reason for Microsoft to remove placeholders.)
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2 100 MB drives pooled equaling 200 MB won't provide data redundancy though so if a hard drive fails you'll have to use your backup to restore data to the replacement drive. With parity you'll get redundancy but only ~half of the total available storage.
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Not half with party, but number of drives - 1. If you have five 500GB drives, for example, the parity is striped across them so any one could fail, meaning 2TB of usable storage of the total 2.5 TB drive capacity. This can be good with SSDs, which have a price curve where the largest drives are either unavailable or more expensive per GB.
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But you cannot do for the system drive.
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Has anyone tested whether and existing storage space configuration in W8.1 will survive an in-place upgrade to W10?
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When I try to optimize the pool it moves all the data to one drive instead of balanceing between them, does anybody know of a fix for this?
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What type of Storage Space, Simple or Mirrored? One "fix" is to create a another Storage Space using the same drives (which you can do, because Storage Spaces allows thin provisioning), and just copy everything from one Storage Space to the other. Not exactly elegant, but it is effective.
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Im using a simple storage space with one 5 tb drive and one 2 tb drive.
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And how much actual data do you have? I'm not sure how the "optimization" works, but it could be really stupid. For example, if you have 3TB of data and no mirroring, it could make sense to put it all on the 5TB drive. That drive is likely newer and faster, so you would want to fill that drive first. After putting all of the data on the 5TB drive, each drive has 2TB of free space, so they are actually balanced in one sense. Unless you're using mirroring, it kind of doesn't matter how they're balanced.
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I have about 2.5TB of data. Yes that does make since, the only reason I wanted the data to be split is so if one drive did fail I wouldn't lose everything. Thanks for your help
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"I'm cool if half of my data gets lost, and I don't care which half" is a weird backup strategy!
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this should support SD/MicroSD , consider half of the windows 10 device are surface devices or other tablet/hybrids
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Great article thanks! Lots of steak and potatoes in this one :) Great job Windows Central offering a broad range from beginning to advance tips, keep em all coming!
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Nice article. I've been thinking of creating a fileserver using Pools, but I'm not that keen on losing ~28TB of data.
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Excellent article.
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Way cool! I didn't know about this feature! How would I use it? Well, I'd probably make a big media network drive for all the computers at home to use, then set it up to mirror to the cloud, and use that cloud equivalent for my mobile devices. My biggest fear in the world of electronics is losing my data irretrievably. Therefore, I'm a big fan of redundancy. I also really have only dabbled in the cloud, so this setup would solve both, plus give me better access to data on my home devices than relying on cloud, constantly update so I'm not missing anything when I'm out of the house (via the cloud), and also provides two separate "instances" of my data - one that's safe from cloud server failures and at least "safer" against hacks on the one end, and another being safe from burglars or house fire, etc. Most of this I could do without this feature, but this will make it a lot easier than buying a drive and running it til it obsoletes, as I can keep refreshing the network drive size dynamically! It's -much- more forward thinking! Very cool! Thanks for putting it on my radar! Cheers!
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so gay
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Wondering if someone might be able to help. I have an old Win8.1 PC that has a storage space set up on it, but I'm going to be replacing the PC soon by either building a new one, or purchasing one. One of the big reasons I haven't done so already is because I don't know how to move the storage space from the current PC to the new one. I'd like to think it's as easy as taking out the drives and putting them in the new machine, but I have a feeling it isn't. If anyone knows how to do this, I'd be happy to provide my email address if you'd be willing to lend a hand. Thanks very much!
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I think this is a great question and asked it myself below. Any answers?
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See posting from Mike Cerm near the top.
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Thanks! I ended up keeping the computer I had storage spaces set up on, and just moving it to my main TV to make it the HTPC in the house. But it's nice to know that it's basically plug and play.
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Does the optimization of disk space work for parity spaces? Early on in May it was suggested it was limited to mirrored and simple spaces, but the option seems to be availble for a parity space as well after threshold 2... Does this also solve the issue of needing X new disks where X is the number of columns when expanding a storage space? ie I have 5 3TB drives in parity... so 5 columns, and 12TB of usable space (3TB is used for parity). If I add another 3TB more and run optimize will I have 15TB of usable space with 3TB still used for parity? Under windows 8 you would have to add 5 new 3TB drives to get anything more.
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What a great article! I have a 3 disk Storage Space running on Windows 8.1. I am reluctant to update to Windows 10 until I hear that the storage space would survive the upgrade. Has anyone had experience of doing this? Best regards
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I upgraded from 8.1 to 10 with no problems. In fact, I moved the drives to a new PC I just built. The storage space was automatically recognized.
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I just posted almost this qestion. For clarity, the "new PC I just built" -- was this from the ground up and after it was running you moved over the drives that has the storage space? Thanks for posting.
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Great article. I was using Windows Home Server v1 way back and they had a similar feature. Just drop in a new drive, add it to the pool and it would automatically rebalance. If a drive was failing (happened once) or if space was running low (happened a lot) , remove a drive from the pool, add a new one, life went on. But, when the PC died, I was unable to move these drives into a new machine and have the storage pool recognized. (FYI: It was the headless HP EX490 - a great looking machine) What happens in this case if, for example, I have a complete failure of the mother board and I'm having to replace it? Suppose also that the mother board worked faithfully for 3-4 years. The implication being that I'm not able to source an exact replacement (and like everybody else on this board, I would suppose, who would want to?). So I rebuild a new Windows 10 sytem with a new system drive and then load up my 5-6 drives that form the Storage Space. What happens? Is it automatically recognized?
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Apparently the answer is that it is that portable.
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Good to hear. Puzzled why you couldnt recover data from the WHS1 drives though. All I had to to when I decommisioned my WHS1 machine was attach each of the drives to another PC, "view hidden files/directories", and bingo, all my files were there for the copying under a hidden folder. No fancy configuration required.
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I got the data as you suggested, but it was a copy process verses it just being recongized.
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Does this mean the data on Storage SPace disks is readable? I'm thinking of replacing an UnRaid media server w/ Storage Spaces on Win10, but having a hard time letting go of UnRaids RAID4 setup which means each drive is readable, so if I lose 2 drives I can still get my data off the other drives.
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When I try to add a drive to my pool, it can't add it. it says to check the drive connection. My drive is online and is still not working... What can I do?
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I might try the following using the disk management tool. Note, this will remove any data that is on the drive. You need to decide if this is ok. 1) If there were any partitions on the drive, I would delete them. If I couldn't, I'd want to know why. I think that storage spaces are trying to do the same thing. If you can't it can't.. so why? 2) I'd create a partition on the drive, using the whole drive and then format it with a drive letter. That way, I'd know if the drive was accessable. If I can access it, I would think the storage space could. Any way, this is just me hacking away. I've been using storage spaces for quite a while now and am very happy. I've got 7 drives in the pool, have upgraded drives several times to make the pool larger, had a controller go wonky, replace it and everything is good again. Good luck!
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Did you manage to fix this? I'm having the same issue.
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Same problem here as well. Tried every drive setup prior to trying to run through the steps above and there is always some issue. Just to provide more info. My drives are:
Boot (Not intending to use in RAID config): Samsun SSD PM871 2.5 7mm 512GB SED
3X Seagate ST500LM021-1KJ152 (These are what I want to use) controllers listed in device manager:
Intel(R) C600+/C220+ series chipset SATA AHCI Controller
Intel(R) C600+/C220+ series chipset sSATA AHCI Controller
Microsoft Storage Spaces Controller Thanks in advance for anyone's time. -
I just managed to fix this. I did two things: 1. Verify and repair bad sectors on the disk. I used the trial version of PartitionGuru, but chkdsk would probably work.Luckily, the program was able to repair all of the 20 or so bad sectors. 2 Tried formatting / adding new partition using Windows Disk Manager and also in the aforementioned guru program, but Storage Spaces would always reject it. Same error as OP. 2. Finally I booted into a Linux partition and used GParted to create a new partition table on the broken disk with the following parameters: (ms-dos) NTFS, master boot drive. Booted to windows, got on storage spaces and it worked. In general, linux exposes deeper layers of the os/machine than does windows. In some ways having dual boot is complementary like that.
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Zach Congrats on this. You are 100% right about GParted. I'm surprised there isn't an economic windows version for times we need it -- for me, once every other year.
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It's an old article, but still very useful. Thanks! I have just migrated from FreeNAS ZFS to Storage Spaces and I'm pretty impressed so far. Question - Windows 8 version apparently supported Tiering, where one could set up SSD caching tier in front of the larger HDD tier and Storage Spaces would automatically cache frequently used files there. Nowhere does it say that this feature is not available in Windows 10, but then I also can't find any instructions on how to do this. So do you know if this has been removed from Windows 10 Pro or if this is still available?
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Great article! Does a Parity-storage space allow me to expand the size by extending the existing drives with larger ones? For a trivial example, I start with 3x500GB, but rather than adding a fourth, I would like to replace the 500GB's with 1TB-drives. Is this just a case of "add", followed by "remove" until all drives have been replaced? The real use-case is probably that in a few of years or so, the harddrive size originally chosen, are no longer produced, so I would be forced to buy larger drives.