Help with Windows 11 Storage Spaces please!

[GokuGogo]

So I had originally put 2 8 TB drives in my PC with the intention of adding more later on recommendation instead of using some other software. I just ran out of space, and tossed in a new drive and added it to the pool.

 

Here's the rub- I wanted to set up a RAID 5 but since I had 2 drives I seem to have selected a 2-way mirror. After adding the 3rd drive, I see no way to change that to a 1-drive parity setup. Do I need to set up a new storage space? Would that wipe the data that I've backed up if I did a new space? Am I stuck with a 1:1 mirror redundancy? I have yet another drive I could add to it, so I'd have 16 TB with a 1:1, but I was hoping for 24GB since this is the central PC station for everything. Whatever budget I had was spent on these last 2 drives, so my next step would be rebuilding an old PC to act as a personal cloud storage that optimistically my whole family could use to back everything up to and be safe.

 

Also, can someone please explain the warning message? It says to look at the physical drive tab for more information, but it just says warning there so I'm confused as to what the problem is. The pool is currently optimizing to balance out the distribution of data. The pic looks wack so sorry in advance for that, I can upload a screenshot if needed. My hand is covering serial number in case its an attack vector I don't know about or something. They're all 8TB Exos drives

 

Any and all info would be greatly appreciated, thanks ahead of time y'all!

[StDragon]

It says "Optimizing drive usage is 10% complete..."

You can add more drives to bring the pool to fault-tolerance, but I don't think you can convert a RAID1 to RAID5. You might have to break the volume (and thus lose all data on it) and re-create it.

I'll let others chime in that know more about Storage Spaces, but for what it's worth, I've always avoided this implementation of storage. The proprietary abstraction doesn't sit well with me.

Also, RAID5 is N-1 drives. So with RAID5, you would end up with a 16 size volume. That's because a single drive worth of parity is distributed among all members in the vol.

[GokuGogo]

40 minutes ago, StDragon said:

It says "Optimizing drive usage is 10% complete..."

You can add more drives to bring the pool to fault-tolerance, but I don't think you can convert a RAID1 to RAID5. You might have to break the volume (and thus lose all data on it) and re-create it.

I'll let others chime in that know more about Storage Spaces, but for what it's worth, I've always avoided this implementation of storage. The proprietary abstraction doesn't sit well with me.

Also, RAID5 is N-1 drives. So with RAID5, you would end up with a 16 size volume. That's because a single drive worth of parity is distributed among all members in the vol.

It's still optimizing, I'm hoping that warning just goes away but for whatever reason it's not coming up in crystaldiskinfo yet is found and transferring data according to Windows storage spaces. Kinda concerning, though maybe I bumped a cable or something. I'll be reseating it after the optimization

 

I have a 4th drive that would bring me to 24GB optimally, but looks like I may be stuck with 16GB for now. What is strange is that I can allot more storage than would be available in a RAID 1, so Im wondering if anything over the mirror amount would be taken care of with parity, or if that data would just become unprotected.

 

I feel ya on the proprietary thing, but outside of building a NAS or something this seemed like the most effective price/performance option just to get everything backed up so I don't lose any projects or files that I want to get into a vault. Do you have any recommendations as to what other options I could have tried?

 

Thanks!

[StDragon]

14 minutes ago, GokuGogo said:

It's still optimizing, I'm hoping that warning just goes away but for whatever reason it's not coming up in crystaldiskinfo yet is found and transferring data according to Windows storage spaces. Kinda concerning, though maybe I bumped a cable or something. I'll be reseating it after the optimization

 

I have a 4th drive that would bring me to 24GB optimally, but looks like I may be stuck with 16GB for now. What is strange is that I can allot more storage than would be available in a RAID 1, so Im wondering if anything over the mirror amount would be taken care of with parity, or if that data would just become unprotected.

 

I feel ya on the proprietary thing, but outside of building a NAS or something this seemed like the most effective price/performance option just to get everything backed up so I don't lose any projects or files that I want to get into a vault. Do you have any recommendations as to what other options I could have tried?

 

Thanks!

 

Honestly, a Synology 4 bay NAS would be better for a storage solution. But, if you wanted to re-use your existing hardware and try something else, then I'll recommend giving TrueNAS Scale a closer look (making a RAIDZ1 volume with ZFS, which is basically a RAID5 vol).

Your biggest challenge will be a place to store your data to migrate it back. Which BTW, you should be having a backup system in place. RAID is not a backup; it's hardware fault-tolerance: very different concepts. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

If you want to switch from mirrors to parity your best way to do it would be to add a parity virtual disk, then copy the data over, and shrink the mirror one and expand the parity one while doing this. 

 

I'd probably be easier if you just started fresh and restore backups though.

 

3 hours ago, GokuGogo said:

 

I have a 4th drive that would bring me to 24GB optimally, but looks like I may be stuck with 16GB for now. What is strange is that I can allot more storage than would be available in a RAID 1, so Im wondering if anything over the mirror amount would be taken care of with parity, or if that data would just become unprotected.

With mirrors in storage spaces you can add a 3rd drive and get 50% of the total space as its not a traditional raid 1.

 

 

[GokuGogo]

6 hours ago, StDragon said:

 

Honestly, a Synology 4 bay NAS would be better for a storage solution. But, if you wanted to re-use your existing hardware and try something else, then I'll recommend giving TrueNAS Scale a closer look (making a RAIDZ1 volume with ZFS, which is basically a RAID5 vol).

Your biggest challenge will be a place to store your data to migrate it back. Which BTW, you should be having a backup system in place. RAID is not a backup; it's hardware fault-tolerance: very different concepts. 

Totally agreed, as mentioned before this is just something to have data backed up somewhere i.e. off my phone, laptop, cameras, etc. in case they break or corrupt. Also, the RAID array is an additional storage place outside of my normal SSD drives I work on.  I totally get that it's like the bare minimum (or one step above since the "Backup" volume at least could lose a drive without a problem. So I could lose both an SSD and an HDD and my data is still there, so long as it's just hardware failure and not a fire or a meteorite lol)

 

Long term I want to repurpose an old, huge tower case and a hand me down 12th gen system plus 6 or 7 drives into a NAS (not sure if that's the exact correct term) and attach it to a network, optimally in a different location for a whole-family backup.

 

Could you recommend any good YouTube resources on TrueNAS Scale so I could study up and start planning? That would be fantastic. Thanks for the advice! 

[GokuGogo]

3 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

If you want to switch from mirrors to parity your best way to do it would be to add a parity virtual disk, then copy the data over, and shrink the mirror one and expand the parity one while doing this. 

 

I'd probably be easier if you just started fresh and restore backups though.

 

 

That sounds like a good idea but a beast to tackle. Seems like the safest way to redo the space would be to get a 2 Bay NAS to move everything to before recreating the space the right way. Fantastic lol

Quote

With mirrors in storage spaces you can add a 3rd drive and get 50% of the total space as its not a traditional raid 1.

So like no mater the quantity of drives it's always using half of the space for redundancy? Is that what it means when it gave me the resiliency size or something like that? I was able to open up more space than 50% but it mentioned that it wouldn't be resilient past like 10.9GB. By any chance does it switch to something like parity or does it just leave a portion of the data naked without any protection past that 10.8GB?

 

I appreciate the info, thank you! 

 

[GokuGogo]

9 hours ago, StDragon said:

 

Honestly, a Synology 4 bay NAS would be better for a storage solution. But, if you wanted to re-use your existing hardware and try something else, then I'll recommend giving TrueNAS Scale a closer look (making a RAIDZ1 volume with ZFS, which is basically a RAID5 vol).

Your biggest challenge will be a place to store your data to migrate it back. Which BTW, you should be having a backup system in place. RAID is not a backup; it's hardware fault-tolerance: very different concepts. 

 

10 hours ago, StDragon said:

It says "Optimizing drive usage is 10% complete..."

You can add more drives to bring the pool to fault-tolerance, but I don't think you can convert a RAID1 to RAID5. You might have to break the volume (and thus lose all data on it) and re-create it.

I'll let others chime in that know more about Storage Spaces, but for what it's worth, I've always avoided this implementation of storage. The proprietary abstraction doesn't sit well with me.

Also, RAID5 is N-1 drives. So with RAID5, you would end up with a 16 size volume. That's because a single drive worth of parity is distributed among all members in the vol.

So, in a dramatic twist it seems that the warning that popped up on the other drive shortly after I added the 3rd drive has some sort of actual issue. I used a seperate power and data cable for drive 3, so I didn't come close to the other drive to possibly bend or crack something. I swapped the SATA power and data cable on that warning drive and switched the port it was in, and I'm still coming up with the same warning message. It also refuses to come up in CrystalDiskInfo like the other 2, yet it does show up in storage spaces. Also, when rebooting it blue screened once I logged in with a "pool failure" message. Nothing since but that was 20 minutes ago and I'm done for tonight lol

 

Any ideas as to what my next step should be here? I was thinking add in my 4th drive, "Optimize" or whatever so the data is redistributed/copied among the drives, and use that remove option to get that drive out of the storage space and maybe just reformat it or something. I'll gladly take any direction that isn't as drastic as my idea, it's just the conclusion I have after pondering this for a few hours.

 

Please let me know, thank you!