Windows Storage spaces

Hello. I read somewhere in a Storage space you can attach drives with different sizes.. I got a pool made of 3 x 500 GB drives. Now i added a 3 TB drive to the pool. But when i try to moves files to the drive. The disk goes offline and under "disk managemet" the disk is offline cause its out of space. Is it cause it cant use the 3 tb drive with 3 x 500 ? in a pool ?

Update: I found the answer. The storage pool does not automatic rebalance the drives. Will this be added in the future ?

Take look at those tutorial:
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/4208-storage-pool-delete-windows-8-a.html
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorial...dd-remove-drives-storage-pool-window-8-a.html
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorial...reate-new-pool-storage-space-windows-8-a.html
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorial...e-storage-space-storage-pool-windows-8-a.html
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorial...rename-storage-pool-storage-space-drives.html
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/6006-storage-spaces-shortcut-create-windows-8-a.html

theog said:

Take look at those tutorial:
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/4208-storage-pool-delete-windows-8-a.html
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorial...dd-remove-drives-storage-pool-window-8-a.html
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorial...reate-new-pool-storage-space-windows-8-a.html
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorial...e-storage-space-storage-pool-windows-8-a.html
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorial...rename-storage-pool-storage-space-drives.html
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/6006-storage-spaces-shortcut-create-windows-8-a.html

Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply. But tbh. theese guide is good to explain how to create and so on. But useless when it comes to more detailed information..

I found the answer by testing whole day, when you add more drives, your parity or whatever you are running will not be rebalanced. So after you added a new drive, you have to copy your files from the drive to the drive. then it read from the drives you got before you added more hdd's and write to all your drives

I hope they will fix this.

What type of resiliency are you running: 2-way-mirror or parity?

pparks1 said:

What type of resiliency are you running: 2-way-mirror or parity?

Click to expand...

Parity. I have not tested it with mirror yet. But i bet its the same. Cause rebalancing is not an option yet.

2 days and im very sone done with backup my stuff, so very soon I can setup my real storage space, but i only tested copying files from a folder to another, But I would try add 3 old hdd's in a pool at fill them up and then add a 4'th disk and try move files from the drive to another place on the drive and see if that works for rebalancing.

If only copy works, then lets say you got a 3x2 (6~TB parity) Then you need to add the next disk when you have used 2 TB. So you got enough space left to copy all your stuff after the new drive is added, to make the copy trick for rebalancing. That sucks

Hmmmm.....this whole Storage Spaces thing ioften doesn't make sense.

I took a Windows 8 VM, and I added 3 x 4GB hard drives to it. I created a storage spaces pool with all 3 disks and that showed up as a total pool size of 9.75GB. My 3gb drives provide 3.25GB of space after overhead/metadata, etc.

So, then I create a Storage Space. I selected Resiliency of Parity and I chose to create a size of 6GB, so including resiliency, it says that it would consume 9GB of disk space. So, just a little less than my total pool capacity of 9.75GB.

Upon creation, it shows that my storage pool is using 3.50GB of 9.75GB of pool capacity
My storage space says 6.0Gb, using 2.25GB of pool capacity.

Windows explorer shows a 6GB drive E that's available (well, 5.87gb according to Windows).

So, then I copied in a 1GB ISO for Exchange Server 2010. As expected my free space in Explorer went from 5.87gb to 4.76gb free.

But looking at my Storage Pool and my Storage space...I increased to using 5.0Gb of my pool and 3.75gb of my storage space... Thus, these both grew by 1.5Gb.

So, I then copied my 1gb ISO file and pasted it onto the same drive. Therefore, I'm using 3.72GB of my 5.87GB volume...so around 2GB was consumed. And my pool increased to 6.5GB out of 9.75 and my storage space increased to 5.25gb of pool capacity.

So, at this point, WIndows explorer says I have 3.72GB free, but storage spaces shows only 750MB or so free.

So, I tried to copy that 1GB ISO file again and paste it to the storage space drive. So, now Explorer says 2.67GB free out of 5.87GB...so around 3gb is consumed...as expected.

My pool now says 8.0GB used out of 9.75GB, and my storage space is telling me I'm using 6.75Gb of pool capacity and I should add 3 MORE drives.

I copied my 1GB iso file again. So, this is the 4th copy of the file, so around 4gb of space total consumed. So, explorer shows 1.63gb free. However, the storage pool says 9.50GB of 9.75GB is consumed, and my storage space says I am using 8.25GB pool capacity, it's in ERROR state and I should add 2 drives.


So, what gives? It appears I created a 6gb volume, that after resiliency purposes would consume approx 9.0gb of my pool...which supposedly provides 9.75gb of space.

However, after copying in 4GB of data, I'm out of space. I'm unable to copy that 1GB iso file again. Even though I have 1.67GB of free space.

So, I have 12GB of physical disk space, and with a normal RAID 5 style config, that would give me around 8GB of usable space. However, after just 4GB of writes, Windows is out of space?????? That's the worst efficiency of disk space I have ever seen.

Okey. I tried to copy all my data to my storage space today, i made a parity and a 3 way mirror.. Data is transfered so slow that i stop this right now. And parity and 2/3 way mirror cant be used with different disk sizes. Or it can but. if the lowest disk is 500 gb and you got 2 x 1 TB then you can use the last 500 gb on the 2 x 1 TB.

Storage spaces is NOT ready for use, yet. No rebalancing POOR performance, My server with cpu is sleeping while transfering data. Hmm the Driver for the storage controller is also from 26-06-2006. Maybe its optimized for the cpu's you could get there ?

I go back to Raid 1.The storage spaces will be the biggest bottleneck in my setup, it will take me back to year 1990. with that performance.

Yeah, performance using the Parity method is simply abysmal. Might as well run your data off a USB key...it will be a lot faster.