storage spaces Windows Storage Spaces additional drives.

[stevemoorevale]

Question regarding windows storage spaces. 

 

I currently have two 4tb drives working together as a mirrored storage space and then two 2tb drives working together as a second mirrored storage space. I am thinking of combing the two so I have one storage space pool made up of 2 4tb drives and two 2tb drives (giving me a total of 6tb usable I hope) My question is this, if one of the 2tb drives fails will it only rebuild that drive from the other 2tb drive or will the entire storage space have to be rebuilt. I don’t see why it would need to touch the 4tb drives that, in this scenario, still work fine.

[Windows7ge]

This sounds like a question @Electronics Wizardy could probably answer.

 

I get the feeling there may be more to it but my best educated guess is it would only rebuild that pair of 2TB drives. If you've appended the pair onto the existing pool I don't think the data is actually being striped between the 4TB's mirror & the 2TB mirror so I don't think they'd have any reason to interfere with the rebuild.

[Electronics Wizardy]

do you have 2 storage pool, or one with 2 virtual disks?

 

Normally you just add more drives to the pool, then run optimize volume, then exend the disk.

 

If you lose a 2tb, it uses daa foom all the other drives to rebuilt, its not a normal raid 10, its just mirroring data on what ever drives have the most free space. It will probably mostly take data from the other 2tb, but you can't control it. Also why does this matter, it just rebuilds the data from where you need it.

But if there seprate storage pools, it will only rebuild from drives in its own pool

[Mr.Humble]

You can also set it up as parity and possibly get up to 8TB of usable capacity (right @leadeater?)

 

Most likely you will need to offload the data first 

[stevemoorevale]

37 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

do you have 2 storage pool, or one with 2 virtual disks?

 

Normally you just add more drives to the pool, then run optimize volume, then exend the disk.

 

If you lose a 2tb, it uses daa foom all the other drives to rebuilt, its not a normal raid 10, its just mirroring data on what ever drives have the most free space. It will probably mostly take data from the other 2tb, but you can't control it. Also why does this matter, it just rebuilds the data from where you need it.

But if there seprate storage pools, it will only rebuild from drives in its own pool

I have two storage pools but want to cut that down to one by adding the disks from the second pool to the first. I’m assuming it will format the drives when I add them. I just wondered whether, if a 2tb drive died in the future, it would only rebuild that drive from the other 2tb drive and not affect the 4tb drives at all.  I think you have answered my question above ‘it just rebuilds the data from where you need it. It’s clever enough to know what’s lost and what needs to be rebuilt. 

[stevemoorevale]

7 minutes ago, Mr.Humble said:

You can also set it up as parity and possibly get up to 8TB of usable capacity (right @leadeater?)

 

Most likely you will need to offload the data first 

Ooooh. This sounds interesting. That would be cool if that’s right. Although I thought you need five drives for parity? I have about six spare drives and a spare data port so I could add one for parity if needed.  I do a lot of photography and video work and just have a small setup to keep my data safe.  It just seemed stupid having two pools made of two drives each so I thought merging into one made up of 4 drives would make more sense. 

[Mr.Humble]

9 minutes ago, stevemoorevale said:

Ooooh. This sounds interesting. That would be cool if that’s right. Although I thought you need five drives for parity? I have about six spare drives and a spare data port so I could add one for parity if needed.  I do a lot of photography and video work and just have a small setup to keep my data safe.  It just seemed stupid having two pools made of two drives each so I thought merging into one made up of 4 drives would make more sense. 

3 drives are needed for parity tolerating 1 drive failure, 7 drives are needed for parity tolerating 2 drive failures without permanent data loss. 

 

You can also Czech out these threads where people have successfully created tiered storage spaces, using an SSD to boost the performance of their pools:

 

 

 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

13 hours ago, Mr.Humble said:

You can also set it up as parity and possibly get up to 8TB of usable capacity (right @leadeater?)

 

Most likely you will need to offload the data first 

Parity will give you up to 6tb of space, you need a min of 3 drives for pairty, so the extra 4tb on the 6tb drives won't be usabe. If you adding a 5th 6tb drive you could have about 14.6tb total

 

13 hours ago, stevemoorevale said:

I have two storage pools but want to cut that down to one by adding the disks from the second pool to the first. I’m assuming it will format the drives when I add them. I just wondered whether, if a 2tb drive died in the future, it would only rebuild that drive from the other 2tb drive and not affect the 4tb drives at all.  I think you have answered my question above ‘it just rebuilds the data from where you need it. It’s clever enough to know what’s lost and what needs to be rebuilt. 

Yea storage spaces will move data around, so with a mirror, only one drive can faile, it will manage exactly where on the disks the data is normally.