Win 10 software RAID help

[ICONchad]

I jumped ship from Apple and I'm new to windows and need to setup raid 5 on my 4 bay akitio drives. In OS X I used softraid software for the setup, what software is there for windows? I formatted the drives and tried storage spaces to setup the raid but I get an error saying "No drives that work with storage spaces are available"

[JoePro87]

2 minutes ago, ICONchad said:

I jumped ship from Apple and I'm new to windows and need to setup raid 5 on my 4 bay akitio drives. In OS X I used softraid software for the setup, what software is there for windows? I formatted the drives and tried storage spaces to setup the raid but I get an error saying "No drives that work with storage spaces are available"

That is odd that you got that error. Are all the drives the same size? And, I could be mistaken, but I THINK Windows 10 only natively supports RAID 0, 1, and 10.

[ICONchad]

all same 4TB drives

[JoePro87]

And you said you formatted them. Did you reallocate them? Or are they showing just "unallocated"?

[ICONchad]

ah just got them to pop up, for some reason it added a few partitions when it formatted so I had to delete those

 

[JoePro87]

1 minute ago, ICONchad said:

ah just got them to pop up, for some reason it added a few partitions when it formatted so I had to delete those

 

Yep. That'll happen. Good luck! Let me know if you need any further help.

[ICONchad]

So is creating a parity in storage spaces the best option for software raid in windows 10?

[JoePro87]

Just now, ICONchad said:

So is creating a parity in storage spaces the best option for software raid in windows 10?

Parity is where it creates a backup of your data. If you don't want to risk losing everything in a drive failure, you should create a parity. Yes. You said you have 4, 4TB drives? I would do a RAID 10, personally. That's where it will stripe the data across 2 drives, offering you double the speed, and mirror those two drives onto 2 others. That way, you can lose up to 2 drives without losing any data. However, you only get 8TB of storage, instead of the full 16. So, up to you, but you're sacrificing storage for speed and resiliency.

[ICONchad]

four 4tb drives it says I have an available pool of 14.5TB and max size of 9.68TB

[JoePro87]

Yep. Sounds about right. The 14.5 is what you get from 16 total (because of the difference between binary and decimal), and with the 9.6, it sounds like it is using 1 drive for backup, and the other 3 for writing, which would give you 12TB (or 9.6 usable). Not how I would do it personally, but not a bad setup. Oh, and keep in mind, this will take HOURS to set up. Hope you have time.

[ICONchad]

cool thanks. Only took a few seconds

[JoePro87]

O_o When I set up RAID 0, it took my computer about 5 hours, and I have a brand new computer running a Ryzen 1700X.

[ICONchad]

3 crashes to storage spaces in the last day and a half that have frozen my computer mid transfer of files and then makes the pool impossible to use without freezing. 

[mealto]

2 hours ago, ICONchad said:

3 crashes to storage spaces in the last day and a half that have frozen my computer mid transfer of files and then makes the pool impossible to use without freezing. 

That is freaky. I know of a few photographers who uses Win 10 and run storage spaces as their mirroring. Hope you don't lose any data. Let us know if you find a fix. There is always 3rd party software but I have found, they have glitches as well.

[ICONchad]

I tried it in 2 different enclosures, power supplies, and thunderbolt cables..same issue.The computer has TB3 and I'm using an adapter to TB2, that's the only thing that I can think of other than windows itself that may be causing the issue.

[ICONchad]

another update..

So what I've been doing is connecting my macbook pro up to a 4 bay drive via TB2 then connecting the macbook pro up to the PC via TB2 adapter to ethernet to the PC

The pc is connected to another 4 bay drive via a TB3 to TB2 adapter. I've been trying to transfer files from the 4 bay drive thru macbook to pc to another 4 bay drive.

 

I thought ok maybe its the ethernet adapter or cable. So I transferred a file from my macbooks drive array to the internal pc drive and then copy it again to the windows storages spaces array...failed and computer froze..So I'm leaning towards the TB3 to TB2 adapter thats connecting the drive array to the pc...ugh what a weekend..

[JoePro87]

15 hours ago, ICONchad said:

-snip-

I hope you get it all worked out. I am lucky, and I haven't had a single issue with mine first. I would definitely check that adapter though.