Windows 10: Storage spaces issues, help required

I want to set up a drive with Raid 5 or parity. Rather than using a hardware raid card i decided to use the storage space option in win 10. My understanding of raid 5 is that you have the capacity of all the drives added together less one drive so if you have a 4 drive setup the available capacity will be equal to three drives. Three drive setup you have the capacity of two drives this indeed what i found when i use my four port 3ware raid cards. rather than buy an 8 port hardware raid card i decided to use Storage spaces with parity option in win to to build my raid pc. i added 6 4TB drives. The formatted capacity of the drives becomes 3.63TB so i reasoned that i should have an array of 18.15 TB and one parity drive. But no windows10 only gives me a 14.52 TB storage space and sets two drives aside as parity. Is this normal for software raid set ups? or is this a function of the win10 implementation. Another thing that seemed odd is that win 10 says i can increase the size of the array simply bey adding another drive to the pool. i thought if you did that the entire array would need re-initialisation with the resulting loss of all the data on the array. I cant seem to find any info on how to fine tune storage spaces on the web. Can some one help me out here, should i get third party raid storage software?

:)

 

Windows 10 Update (not upgrade)

Hello Joey,

Meeting the required storage space for Windows 10 in order to install the Update is imperative. There are some ways to free up your drive space to comply with the required storage space in installing the update. The article below will provide you with several
ways to free up some storage space in your Windows 10 PC.

Free up drive space in Windows 10

Once you free up some space, kindly attempt to install the update through the update assistant. Kindly post back the result once you are done.

Your response will be highly appreciated.

 

Help with Storage Spaces

I am building a large storage array for a friend's sizable media collection. The target is >25 TB usable, and there are currently 6 6TB WD Red drives for the array with an SSD as the boot drive. I want a RAID5 (called "Parity" in the Windows Storage Spaces
options). The Windows 10 setup wizard makes this process very easy and it seems to work quite well. However, we noticed that two drives rather than 1 were missing from the usable capacity of the array (22.5 TB usable out of 33 TB total versus 28 TB out of
33). Two disks, rather than one, were being used as parity drives. This is referred to as RAID6. We tested it out and found that with 3 or 4 disk arrays, the Storage Spaces system defaults to a RAID5 array (i.e. one drive is subtracted from the usable capacity
for parity). I cannot find a way to select which RAID level Storage Spaces utilizes when creating the RAID array.

My question is this: how can I force Storage Spaces to create a RAID5 array versus a RAID6? If there isn't a way to select the RAID level used, there should be. I think that would be fairly simple to explain in a tooltip ("More Space" versus "Better Data
Security"). Alternately, MS could change the number of disks at which the array defaults from RAID5 to RAID6. As it stands, using 5+ disks in a "Parity" (RAID5 or RAID6) array means that you only gain ~10% more space over a simple RAID1 at 5 disks and ~15%
at 6 disks.

I hope there is a simple solution, as he would prefer not to transfer 20 TB of files just to have to rebuild the array when he can get the extra disk back.

 

A note of caution: I recall a thread fairly recently where upgrading the Windows build had serious effects on the storage space configuration - the user had to go back to the previous build to regain access to data.

I have no idea how common a problem that is.