Windows 10: Storage Spaces Just made all my hard drives "retired" - how do I fix this

As the title suggests, but some background.


I have Used Storage spaces for about 4 years with 4 x 3TB Seagate NAS hard-drives

Moved house over the weekend and reconnected the computer to the network and it worked fine last night.


Today however the Virtual Storage Space drive is gone but can be found in "manage storage spaces" with the error "inaccessible; check the Physical drives section"


In the physical drives section:

-Each drive shows up as attached, % used, Providing its capacity with - "Error, Retired; add a drive then remove this drive"


It shows the same for all 4 drives.


How do I fix this. Surely not all 4 drives died overnight. There have been no power surges overnight and the computer itself seems fine otherwise.

:)

 

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

****I asked this question in Windows Tech Net, but got no response. I am not an IT Pro, so maybe I posted in the wrong forum. This issue seems to be happening to others and the Windows Key + X.... solution I saw elsewhere on this forum did not work for me.
Here is my question....*****

I have 16 USB drives pooled in Windows 10 Storage Spaces (mostly 3TB to 5TB drives). Most of the pool is used as parity storage volume. I also have small 2 and 3 way volumes and a simple volume with little data on them. The pool was at about 68% capacity
before a 5TB drive failed. Storage Spaces automatically moved data off the failed drive and currently reports: 0.42% used, providing 4.54TB pool capacity. Error code for the failed drive in Physical Drives listing reads: Retired; add a drive then remove this
drive.

The Parity Storage Spaces volume now reads: Warning, Low capacity: add 2 drives. Because when data was reallocated to the remaining drives, the parity volume is now over 70% full.

What I have done.

1. I bought a new 5TB USB drive and added it to the storage pool. Attempted to "remove" the failed drive in the GUI Physcial drives listing. Got an error with detail: "Drive could not be removed because not all data could be reallocated. Add an additional
drive to this pool and reattempt this operation." I don't understand how adding a new 5TB drive to the pool was not large enough to reallocate the remaining 0.42% data used on the failed drive. Thought maybe the 70% low capacity error message had something
to do with it. So....

2. I then added two smaller USB drives (200GB, 500GB) to the pool and the "low capacity" and "add 2 drives" messages were cleared. I attempted to once again remove the retired drive in the Storage Spaces GUI, but got the same message as before that the pool
was not large enough to reallocate the remaining data on the failed drive.

After googling this issue of how to remove Storage Spaces retired drives, I believe I am not the only one with these concerns and I have yet to find an answer. I have effectively replaced one failed 5TB drive with three drives providing almost 6TB and yet
Storage Spaces will not let me remove the failed 5TB drive.

The failed drive is only about 4 months old, so I would like to remove it from Storage Spaces, run diagnostics on it, and RMA it for a replacement. However, don't want to "crash" the Storage Spaces by just unplugging the failed drive and physically removing
it on my own when the GUI says I can't.

Storage Spaces is still running fine despite the one failed drive, so no complaints. Just want to know how to get this retired drive off my pool. Have started learning how to use Powershell, so willing to go beyond the Windows 10 Storage Spaces GUI if needed.
Any help appreciated.

 

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

After spending a few more hours on YouTube looking at everything about Storage Spaces, I found one video where a guy shows how to use the Powershell commands to "retire" a specific drive in the Storage Space pool of drives. This essentially tells Storage
Spaces to reallocate the data on the selected drive and prepare it for removal. The reallocation works on Parity and 2 and 3 way mirror volumes, but NOT for Simple volumes, which he added in his comments section. Since I no longer use Simple volumes in my
Storage Spaces pool, the "retire" Powershell command would do everything else I wanted in my proposed "vacate drive" command. I can live with the Powershell retire command until the Storage Spaces GUI adds a method to retire a drive.

BTW, I talked to a few other local computer guys who tried Storage Spaces on their systems. Both said that they had used Simple volumes as part of their pool, and everything was great until it wasn't. Both reported that they lost ALL their data in their
Simple volumes when one drive failed. Fortunately for me, my failed drive was still seen by my Storage Spaces and was automatically "retired." I was able to manually transfer all the data on the Simple volume to a Parity volume. If the drive had totally failed
and was no longer recognized by Storage Spaces, I guess I would also have lost everything!?

I was under the impression that if you had a Simple volume on a multi drive pool, and one drive failed, you would only lose data on that drive. What I think people are experiencing, is that the ENTIRE Simple volume, spanning multiple drives, will lose ALL
data when the Simple volume becomes inaccessible due to a drive failure (Storage Spaces no longer sees the failed drive at all).

At best, if you need faster read/write times than a Parity or Mirror volume on your server, then a Simple volume should only be considered as a limited TEMP file storage solution. For me, it's no longer worth it and if I need a simple backup of my data,
I'll just use a standalone USB HDD not associated with Storage Spaces.