Windows 10: How Remove Drive that appears healthy from Storage Space?

Hard Drive Sentinel has flagged a drive in a storage space as having 10% bad sectors, and estimated to fail soon.

When I go into Storage Space Management, I do not see the optin to remove the drive.

Is there a way to remove and replace it or do I have to wait for it to fail?





:)

 

How to remove a bad drive in Windows 10 storage spaces pool

Could someone list the steps involved in replacing a bad drive from a Windows 10 storage spaces pool? I cannot find any info on the Microsoft support site that is specific to Windows 10. Also, could you list the steps to remove a 'good' drive and replace
it with another drive if the process is different?

 

Cannot remove a "Retired" drive in Windows 10 Storage Spaces

Hi Mark,

The November 2015 Update added some nice features to Storage Spaces. But it is two steps forward and one step back. The new Optimize feature does not work with Parity volumes. If you try to Optimize a Parity volume, you get stuck in an endless loop. Worse
yet, when you add a drive to the Storage Spaces pool, there is a default box checked to optimize your Storage Spaces drives. It does not look to see if you have a Parity volume on your Storage Spaces pool, so if you do not notice that box and manually uncheck
it, it will add the new drive and try to optimize all your volumes on your Storage Spaces pool. When it gets to the Parity volume - you get stuck in an endless loop again.

The only way I recovered from the endless loop on trying to optimize a Parity volume was to crash the entire Storage Spaces. I disconnected ALL my drives and started adding them back one at a time. When SS had enough drives to realize that there was a Storage
Space volume(s), but still in error state, I was able to cancel out of the optimize routine. Once the optimize routine was stopped, I was able to add the remaining drives and get back to normal service. If there is a better way, I hope someone will tell us.

The other new feature on the November update is the ability to use the SS GUI to retire and prepare a drive for removal. So far, this feature has worked well for me, as long as the drive you want to remove is still in a healthy status. SS will retire the
drive, reallocate all the data to other drives in the pool, and then notify you when you can physically remove it.

Recently, I had a drive completely fail/die in my SS pool. The drive was correctly marked retired by SS and all data was reallocated to other drives, but I am not able to remove it because the status of that dead drive is "Lost Communication." The SS Parity
volume in my pool is in a "degraded" status and SS will not let me remove the "Lost Communication" drive. This is an issue that I have taken up in a separate post as I am reading this situation is happening to others as well.

So, yes, I like the November 2015 update, especially the ability to retire a healthy drive, but there are still issues with the way the optimize feature does not check to see if there is a Parity volume on your SS pool and therefore gets stuck in an endless
loop trying to optimize the Parity volume when it cannot.

 

Cannot remove a "Retired" drive in Windows 10 Storage Spaces

We just released a couple of new Storage Spaces features with the
Windows 10 November update that should help deal with removing and adding drives:

• Optimize drive usage to make the best use of all of your drives after adding drives
• Safely remove a drive from a pool by automatically moving data off the drive and onto other drives in the pool.

To make use of these features you'll have to install the
Windows 10 November update. Our latest Help content briefly covers the new Storage Spaces functionality:

Storage Spaces in Windows 10.

Cheers!

Jason Gerend - Senior Content Developer for Storage Spaces