Windows 10: Storage spaces, parity, and adding an additional drive

I have been running storage spaces on my Win10 computer for quite some time now (and am happy with it, even when I lost a drive it recovered nicely). It worked without being annoyingly overcomplicated, and I really just needed slow, safe space.
My setup: 3x hard drives, the smallest being 3tb. I set this up as a parity, default settings. This was all going great until I started running out of space, and decided why upgrade hard drives, when I could just add hard drives? My 3tb drives are perfectly usable, no need to trash them just because I'm out of space.
So, I plugged in an 8tb drive (knowing I would only get 3tb usable, because that's the size of my smallest drive), and went through the GUI to "Add drive".
Bam. drive added. I now have 3x data spanning 4 drives, instead of 2x data spanning 3 drives!
Wrong.
Apparently "just works" does not apply to adding a new drive to a parity space. "Columns" are apparently unchangeable. If I have 3x disks, I have 2x data 1x parity worth of storage. If I add a 4th disk, this does not change! Or, maybe I have 2x data and all 4 disks have parity data scattered around, for a minimum of 1x parity still. Either way, my 6TB pool (3x 3tb disks - 1disk for parity) does NOT grow when I add a new disk. Vastly inconvenient.
(If someone knows a way to add a column to this without starting over from scratch, that would be awesome).
So, I thought to myself:
I have a pool of 4 disks. I have a small bit of extra space. Why not make a second storage space that spans the same 4 disks? So one pool, I now have 1 parity space of 4 disks/3 columns, and 1 parity space of 4 disks, 4 columns.
I can gradually cut/paste my data from my 3col space to my 4col space, and grow my 4col as space clears up on my 3col.
Screenshot of the 2 "spaces" and the command I used to create the 4column virtual disk:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rUm4HSTtIQfVvkHnQU_eZVmv7duQ_9rW/view?usp=sharing
BUT: it is saying "low on space, add 3 disks". If this is a 4 column space, and I built it on 4 disks, shouldn't it be asking for 4 disks?
Did I do this all wrong?
Do I need to buy another hard drive, move all my crap to it, and just nuke this entire pool? I really don't want to do that, because I am afraid of having all my data on a single disk during the transition. A single, NEW disk.
Is my "create a second storage space and migrate data over" I was attempting a valid approach? Dangerous and cheap?

:)

 

Windows Storage Spaces - Replacing HDDs in an existing Parity space with larger capacity drives.

I have a 6TB Parity storage space, consisting of four 2TB drives (capacity of three drives usable, one for parity) configured through Windows Storage Spaces. For those who don't know, Parity in Widnows Storage Spaces is essentially the same as RAID5. The
OS (W10Pro) resides on a seperate SSD outside of this configuration.

Let's say in the future I fill my 6TB want to increase the capacity of this storage. I then want to replace all these 2TB drives with 4TB drives, to increase the capacity of the storage space from 6TB to 12TB. I want to do this without moving the data to
external storage, as I don't have the space to do that (not after everyone's lectures/opinions on their backing up methods etc, just want to know if this is possible)

I am wanting to know if I replace one 2TB drive with a 4TB, let it rebuild, then replace the next etc, and so on until all four drives have been replaced and rebuilt the configuration, will I then be able to access the larger capacity of the drives (12TB),
or will I still be stuck at 6TB? Will storage spaces detect all drives are now at least 4TB and offer me the larger capacity?

Thanks

 

Storage Spaces - Is there a calculator ?

Ben,

I realise this hasn't been answered in a few months, but I thought I'd fill this in other users of Storage Spaces. Basically people tend to think about Storage Space like a traditional RAID type set up. It doesn't quite work that way. Storage Space provide
data resiliency from data corruption such as bit rot and device failure. You stated that you wanted to pool 3 drives which total 10TB of space. For a 3 drive set up you only have 2 options, a 2-way mirror space and a parity space or both. A 2-way mirror consumes
space using a factor of 2 so the 10TB / 2 = 5TB of usable space. A parity space consumes space using a factor of 1.5, so the 10TB / 1.5 = 6.66TB of space. Storage spaces is very flexible and adding an additional drive to the pool would move your current data
around to make the most use of the additional space that you added. The reason you are seeing a small figure for your parity space is because your 3rd volume is only 2TB in size so it can only yield 3.63TB of space used. If you want to overcome this hurdle
you could create 2 spaces on a single pool, a mirror and a parity. Let me know if this answers your original question. Thanks.

Sam

 

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.