TheEnglishGasMan

Thanks again for the support rendered. Update : After 36 hours of waiting, the drives did not move from 6.56% so I decided to cut my losses. I went through my files (the last 2TB as outlined in first post) and manually copied them onto the new 10TB disk. From 880 or so files left, I managed to salvage around 280 with 600 being unreadable / unmoveable. All in all, from 9.08TB of data - I managed to salvage 7.2TB. I then deleted the storage pool and one by one removed all 6 drives from the pool. Drive Testing : I downloaded SeaTools and ran a combination of 3 basic tests across the drives (SMART Check, Short Drive Self Test and Short Generic Read). Surprisingly all drives passed SMART and Short Drive Self Tests but unsurprisingly two drives failed the Short Generic Read tests. The two drives with warnings in earlier screenshots. These drives will be RMA'd back to Seagate. Still can't believe that I got two brand new drives that failed within one month of operation, never happend to me before in 20 years of being an enthusiast. Guess I'll be more careful with Neweggs hard disk sales moving forward. Recreating the Pool & A New Issue : I formatted the good drives with Windows Disk Manager and ran the SeaTools tests again. I tried to recreate my original 20TB storage pool with the 2 x 10TB hard disks and have begun encountering a new error : I then tried to create a new pool with the 2 remaining 16TB disks and encountered the same error. Interestingly - When the storage pool creation fails, the drives selected for the pool become "unallocated" in drive management and need to be recreated as simple volumes every time. Spent a few hours researching this error and have done the following troubleshooting : Switched all SATA Data Cables around physically (on drives & on motherboard). Disabled / Re-enabled disks in Device Manager Tried creating a pool with a single drive with the plan to then add a drive once the pool was created (found a thread on another TechForum that said this resolved the issue for them). Booted into Safe Mode and tried creating the pool there (another TechForum had mentioned this had worked for them). Unfortunately none of the above have been successful. I'm yet to try the below : SeaTools Overwrite / Sanitize Erase to format the drives - My thinking here is that maybe Windows can tell that these drives used to be part of a previous pool (maybe some residual metadata) and is not letting me create a new pool. Fresh Windows install - Can't see how this would work though as boot drive was not part of the pool. Powershell - I understand you can execute storage space instructions through Powershell but again my experience with PS is very limited. Hardware RAID - My MSI Z270 board has onboard Hardware Raid and I'm thinking of going down this route. Worried I would lose the Storage Space flexibility of creating a single drive letter with multiple drives in the future. Anyone experienced this issue before? *DEEP SIGH* Thanks again in advance for any support.

@brwainer Thanks for the reply. Yes, that's where I'm leaning towards - to send both back to Seagate but will still run SeaTools once Im done with the pool. Update : Unfortunately it seems that the warning drives are stuck at 6.56% during Preparing for removal. They've been at 6.56% for about 6 hours now. I tried to "Remove" on the warning drives again and I get the same error as above "Can't remove drive from the pool - data cannot be reallocated, add a new drive to the pool and try again" What is the best way to proceed? Thanks in advance for the support.

@leadeater & @WereCatf Thanks both. The two drives are now at 10% and 9.8% and the horrific noises from before seem to have stopped (fingers crossed). Once done, I'll format and run them through SeaTools to check health before attempting to reintroduce.

@leadeater & @brwainer Thank you guys for your quick responses. It's much appreciated - as you can tell, a little out of my depth here. Update : Bad News After trying to migrate the data manually (before posting this) and it failing. I cancelled the transfer. It took a good two hours for it to finally cancel. I rebooted the machine and went back into storage spaces. I now have 2 of the 16TB drives with warnings. For some reason, serial numbers are not displayed when the drives have warnings. Not sure why this is. Good News (maybe?) Fed up, I booted into Safe mode and went back into storage spaces - not sure why but maybe hoping the 2nd drive didn't have the warning, but it did. I then tried to remove the two drives via the remove option (there was no prepare for removal option). Same as this earlier today - I received the Can't remove drive from the pool error as mentioned above. Shut down and booted back into normal windows with the plan of doing one more check then physically removing the drives as mentioned above. This time when I entered storage spaces - to my surprise - the two drives with warnings are now under status "Preparing for removal" and over the space of the last few hours their usage has gone from 22% & 24.3% to 13%. I'm assuming this means that storage spaces is reallocating the data to the other disks in the pool? If this works.... would you advise to remove the two "warning" drives from the pool, re-format them and try to reuse them? Tough times getting any sort of delivery services here at the moment and would love to avoid sending the drive back to Seagate.

@leadeater Thanks for your reply. My apologies for not including in the original post. I had originally attempted to the remove the drive from the pool and received the following error : Can't remove drive from the pool Drive could not be removed because not all data could be reallocated. Add an additional drive to this pool to reattempt this operation. Should I go ahead and physically unplug the drive to force removal?

Hi There, Looking for some help please from one of the many gurus on here : Context I have recently upgraded my home server by increasing overall storage capacity from 20 TB to 84 TB by adding a bunch of brand new Seagate 16TB disks that were on sale @ Newegg in April. My total drive pool now looks like this : 1 x Samsung 960 PRO NVMe M.2 SSD (1 TB) Boot Drive 2 x Seagate IronWolf Pro 10TB Disks (20 TB) Original Pool 4 x Seagate Exos 16TB Disks (64 TB) New Disks Total useable pool = 76.3 TB My original 20 TB setup was configured in Windows Storage Spaces and in Two-way mirror format. The boot drive was not part of the storage pool. I added all 4 Exos disks to the pool at once (which I now regret) and for a month had no issues. Unfortunately, one of the Exos drives has since failed (My first hard disk failure in over 10 years and on a brand new disk). Thankfully, I had not migrated all data from various external and other hard disks to the server yet - so total consumption of the pool is only 9.08 TB (I have provided a screenshot below). Proposed Resolution To diagnose/ confirm the issue with the failed disk (and to send it back to Seagate for replacement) I need to delete the storage pool. First, I need to transfer my data from the pool. I bought another Seagate IronWolf Pro 10TB disk - connected it up and began migrating the data from the pool. My plan was to do the above, then recreate the pool with the 2 x 10 TB hard disks, then 2 x 16 TB hard disks. Then finally when Seagate sends me a replacement drive - to upgrade the pool with the other 2 drives. The Problem 7 TB of the 9.08 TB transferred without any issues. Today while transferring the remaining 2.08 TB - I noticed the transfer speed dropping to 0 and the suspected failed drive making some horrible noises. The transfer is now stuck and it seems the remaining data on the pool is unreadable. My Questions How can the data on the pool be unreadable? I have 6 disks in there - 1 set of 3 for useage and 1 set for mirror. Even with one drive down, the data should be mirrored on the other drives and fully readable. Am I missing something? Is there any other proposed resolution? To prevent this from happening again - would you have any suggestions? This is my first experience with Software RAID or RAID of any kind actually. Historically I have used a Drobo DAS for the last 6 years or so and never had a problem. Yours faithfully, The Gas Man

Thanks for all the suggestions to those who replied. I couldn't get any of your suggestions to work unfortunately and decided to go nuclear. I formatted PC#02 and installed Windows Pro on it, the same build as the other three machines. Almost instantly after booting - all devices are now visible across the network and to each other. This is now resolved.

I have tried to Map the drives of the missing network PC on PC's 1, 3 and 4. Obviously, as the machine is not visible on the network - I'm not able to select it from the prompted network devices drop down list. Entering the drive location manually of the missing PC - \\Desktop-XXXXXX\d and hitting enter. I now see the drive in the list of network locations but when trying to access it I'm prompted with a Network error : "Windows cannot access \\Desktop-XXXXX\d You do not have permission to access \\Desktop-XXXXX\d\. Contact your network administrator to request access" The desktop I'm trying to access is not password protected and I have full control access granted for the mentioned drive. 1. All PC's are in the same workgroup called "WORKGROUP". Network ID option is greyed out for all 4 PCs. 2. All PC's have their network connection in Private Mode. Could it be firewall related? Thank you for your replies Regards, The Gas Man

Please see my replies below : I can ping all machines on the network from each other, i.e. PC 1 can ping 4, and 4 can ping 3 and so on. No issues. PC #02 can also ping the other machines and be pinged itself. 0% Loss. PC#02 is just not visible as a computer on the network in the File Explorer Network devices. Thanks for advice on SMB1.0! Thanks for your reply. All 4 machines are set to Private networks. As the pings are successful - is there anyway I can manually map it? Not sure if this helps but I've also noticed that while in the Network devices in File Explorer; there is a difference in which machines can see which. PC 1 can see PC 3 & 4 as computers in the Network (2 Total) PC 2 can see itself and the other 3 PCs as computers in the Network. (4 Total) PC 3 can see PC 1 & 4 as computers in the network (2 Total). PC 4 can see PC 1 & 3 as computers in the network (2 Total). Not sure again if this is of any relevance.

Hello clever people and fellow LTT fans! I recently upgraded to a wired home network after years of terrible WiFi and could not be happier, it was a great decision. I'm a life-long PC and computing enthusiast, unfortunately my skills are restricted to custom watercooling and MS excel formulas. Oh and now running ethernet cable through walls it seems. I was therefore pretty pleased that after getting the wiring setup through the walls - it was simply a job of plugging the cat6 cables into the ethernet ports on my machines, plugging the other ends into the router, sharing the drives and hey presto - a home network with consistent speeds double what I was getting on WiFi. Beautiful. I have 4 machines in my house and have them connected directly to the routers 4 ethernet ports (sans a switch); PC #01 - HTPC / File Server PC #02 - Gaming System PC #03 - Work System PC #04 - Arcade Cabinet All 4 machines have no issues individually when it comes to network or internet connectivity, the issue is PC #02 is only visible to itself on the network, I cannot see it or access it from any other machine. I can access all other machines from each other without issue. I do try and address my technical issues myself first before asking for help, however I either can't find the exact FAQ or similar example I'm looking for or it's simply beyond my capability. Either way I'm stuck. Below is what I've done so far : Changing all cables around Resetting router / modem Upgraded firmware Password protected / unprotected drive sharing Played with SMB1.0/CIFS File Sharing settings across the machines (at one point I actually lost visibility of multiple machines playing with this feature but always restored back). The only other thing I can add is that the machines are not all running the same version of Windows - PC's 1, 3 and 4 are all Windows 10 Pro Build 18363 where as PC 2 - the PC I'm having the issue with is running Windows 10 Home Build 18362. I noticed when playing with the CIFS File Sharing settings that by default, PC's 1, 3 and 4 are running SMB Direct where PC 2 is running SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support. Guessed this was related to Windows version but not sure it makes a difference. Any support that can be rendered will be greatly appreciated. Sincerely, The Gas Man

Hi There, In 2018 - I've tasked myself with building a Home Media Server Setup and new Gaming PC (Hard Line watercooled - I'm a water cooling virgin). I have my SMA-8 ready for the gaming build but GPU's are still too expensive and I refuse to spend the bucks so I'm going ahead with the Server Build first . Below is my current setup : This is what I'm thinking of moving to : Thought process and assumptions : Don't have to buy a LAN Switch in above setup; utilise current Router. With PLEX Server Side installed on Media Server + Clients installed on other devices. 64GB DDR4 + Ryzen 1700X in NAS for Multi-Streaming 10 Gbps Connection between Gaming PC (Main Use Machine) + Media Server for remote data maintenance / uploading. Would love your builds / feedback / constructive criticism and advice please! Thanks in advance