Windows 10: Why does Storage Spaces show a different used capacity than Explorer?

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:)

 

Windows Storage Spaces Capacity Issue

I have an issue with Windows Storage Spaces. I have roughly 6.5TB worth of data. I have a Storage Space with 4 drives in a 2-way mirror. This is my ‘F’ drive. 2 of the drives are 2TB. 2 drives are 5TB. Windows reports this as 9.27TB. Windows is reporting
2TB free. Storage is reporting space is full on the F drive. Storage Spaces is correct and Windows is confused because 2 way mirror with 4 drives/different capacities.

So I was playing around with Storage Spaces and expanded the ‘drive’ from 9 to 12TB. This was an error and will come to haunt me later. I realize now you cannot reduce the storage size. I am not sure why I did this but Storage Spaces on the F drive now
wants more drives for more capacity. Most likely to meet my unwanted 12TB expansion.

I then had an idea. I will just build a new Storage Space with a 6.5TB worth of capacity. So I went ahead and brought 3 4TB drives. This should in theory give 7 – 8TB. So installed these drives. Then I attempted to create a new 8TB – ‘K’ drive. Then
I would assign these 3 new drives just to this Storage Space. Then copy my data over from the F to the K drive. This all worked out nicely in my head.

I attempted to do the above and Storage Space Creation failed at an 8TB creation of the Space. Probably because it does not have nearly enough space because – I expanded the F drive from earlier, even if everything is thin provisioned.

So I said maybe if I just create a Storage Space – K and then expand the capacity of this Space it will work. This is not working either. So now I have a 9.7 but really 12TB – F Storage Space. Then a 2TB K drive – I cannot expand.

I realize now when you add disks to Storage Spaces you cannot assign the drive to ‘X’ Storage Space. All disks basically become party of the ‘pool’. So these drives basically appear to belong to both the F and K Storage Spaces.

So what are my options?

• Backup the data on the F drive. (I use Veeam – and my backup is an 8TB external drive) Destroy both the F and K drive. Then start over and use parity. Restore the data back to the new storage space. This is probably the easiest option but my data only
  exists in 1 spot locally. (I also backup my data to the cloud)
• Create a RAID – hardware or software with these 3 new drives. Copy the data over to this new RAID – K drive. Destroy the F drive from Storage Space. Recreate the ‘F’ drive using parity from Storage Spaces. I will have plenty of capacity – between 9
  – 10TB. Then copy the data over from the RAID – K drive back to the F drive. This plan would work to just lots of time and riskier with moving this much data multiple times.
• The reason I am posting here… someone knows more about Storage Spaces than I do and can offer a different/better solution.

Thanks.

 

Understanding Storage Spaces capacity descriptions

I have a Storage Spaces array in Windows 10 consisting of 7 SATA HDDs ranging from 3TB -> 8TB each (-edit- for completeness, those drive capacities are: {3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 8, 8}).

I'm trying to understand the Storage Spaces capacity values, shown below:





The section above the drive Name & Letter makes sense in isolation:

• 15 TB
  
  • defined size, with thin provisioning allowing it to exceed actual
    available capacity
    
• Using 14.6 TB pool capacity
  
  • the actual available configured capacity
    

And the 31.8 TB "Total pool capacity" makes complete sense as the sum of the actual disk capacity from each drive.

But...

1. Why is only 14.6 available?
   
   • I've defined my size as 15 TB
     
   • It says I have 17.2 TB available
     
2. What's the relationship here of the 22.5 TB "Including resiliency"?
   
3. What is my actual real max configurable usable capacity?
   
   • I expected to have around 20 TB (66% of 32) - so I'm guessing it's actually only 17.2, but then see question #1
     

 

Storage Space shows low capacity warning

Hello Chaeril,

Thank you for posting your concern in Microsoft community and welcome to the Windows 10 Family.

Windows created the low disk space warning to alert computer users when their hard drive is running low on available disk space. However in your case, the warning itself shows incorrect while there is still space left.

To be able to assist you better please let us know few more details on the below questions.

1. What is the make and the model of your computer?

2. Is the D: drive which you have shared the information about a secondary drive or a primary drive (Windows drive)?

Before proceeding, please check if the same issue occur when logged in through a different user account.

Ref:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/getstarted-set-up-accounts

This issue may happen due to system file corruption. I suggest you to run System file checker. System File checker (SFC) scan is done to check if there are any corrupted system files that could be causing this issue. Kindly follow
the below given steps:

• 
  Press Windows key + X, select
  Command prompt (Admin) to bring up elevated Command prompt.
  
• 
  In Command prompt type
  sfc/scannow and press enter.
  
• Restart the computer.

If no corrupted system files were found in the previous state, then I suggest you to try the following steps to employ the DISM command lines:

• 
  Open command prompt by pressing Windows key + X and selecting “Command prompt admin”.
  
• 
  In command prompt, type the following commands and press Enter after each command:
  
  DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Scanhealth
  
  DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth
  

• 
  Close the command prompt and restart the PC and check if it works.
  

If the above recommendation did not work, I would suggest you to follow the below steps as a work around to stop the Windows notification of low disk space.

• Press the ‘Windows + R’ key on the keyboard to open the Run Command Dialog Box.
• Type in regedit to open the Registry Editor.
• Navigate down to HKEY_CURRENT_USER / Software / Microsoft / Windows / CurrentVersion / Policies / Explorer
• If the NoLowDiskSpaceChecks key is not there, right-click to create a new DWORD value with that name.
• Double-click on NoLowDiskSpaceChecks, enter 1 for the value
• Press OK and exit from REGEDIT.

Important: This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore,
make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following
article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

322756 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756/ )

How to back up and restore the registry in Windows

Hope the above information was helpful. If you need further information, feel free to write to us and we would be happy to help you.

Thank you.