I
Izzmit
Guest
I have been running storage spaces on my Win10 computer for quite some time now (and am happy with it, even when I lost a drive it recovered nicely). It worked without being annoyingly overcomplicated, and I really just needed slow, safe space.
My setup: 3x hard drives, the smallest being 3tb. I set this up as a parity, default settings. This was all going great until I started running out of space, and decided why upgrade hard drives, when I could just add hard drives? My 3tb drives are perfectly usable, no need to trash them just because I'm out of space.
So, I plugged in an 8tb drive (knowing I would only get 3tb usable, because that's the size of my smallest drive), and went through the GUI to "Add drive".
Bam. drive added. I now have 3x data spanning 4 drives, instead of 2x data spanning 3 drives!
Wrong.
Apparently "just works" does not apply to adding a new drive to a parity space. "Columns" are apparently unchangeable. If I have 3x disks, I have 2x data 1x parity worth of storage. If I add a 4th disk, this does not change! Or, maybe I have 2x data and all 4 disks have parity data scattered around, for a minimum of 1x parity still. Either way, my 6TB pool (3x 3tb disks - 1disk for parity) does NOT grow when I add a new disk. Vastly inconvenient.
(If someone knows a way to add a column to this without starting over from scratch, that would be awesome).
So, I thought to myself:
I have a pool of 4 disks. I have a small bit of extra space. Why not make a second storage space that spans the same 4 disks? So one pool, I now have 1 parity space of 4 disks/3 columns, and 1 parity space of 4 disks, 4 columns.
I can gradually cut/paste my data from my 3col space to my 4col space, and grow my 4col as space clears up on my 3col.
Screenshot of the 2 "spaces" and the command I used to create the 4column virtual disk:
BUT: it is saying "low on space, add 3 disks". If this is a 4 column space, and I built it on 4 disks, shouldn't it be asking for 4 disks?
Did I do this all wrong?
Do I need to buy another hard drive, move all my crap to it, and just nuke this entire pool? I really don't want to do that, because I am afraid of having all my data on a single disk during the transition. A single, NEW disk.
Is my "create a second storage space and migrate data over" I was attempting a valid approach? Dangerous and cheap?
More...
My setup: 3x hard drives, the smallest being 3tb. I set this up as a parity, default settings. This was all going great until I started running out of space, and decided why upgrade hard drives, when I could just add hard drives? My 3tb drives are perfectly usable, no need to trash them just because I'm out of space.
So, I plugged in an 8tb drive (knowing I would only get 3tb usable, because that's the size of my smallest drive), and went through the GUI to "Add drive".
Bam. drive added. I now have 3x data spanning 4 drives, instead of 2x data spanning 3 drives!
Wrong.
Apparently "just works" does not apply to adding a new drive to a parity space. "Columns" are apparently unchangeable. If I have 3x disks, I have 2x data 1x parity worth of storage. If I add a 4th disk, this does not change! Or, maybe I have 2x data and all 4 disks have parity data scattered around, for a minimum of 1x parity still. Either way, my 6TB pool (3x 3tb disks - 1disk for parity) does NOT grow when I add a new disk. Vastly inconvenient.
(If someone knows a way to add a column to this without starting over from scratch, that would be awesome).
So, I thought to myself:
I have a pool of 4 disks. I have a small bit of extra space. Why not make a second storage space that spans the same 4 disks? So one pool, I now have 1 parity space of 4 disks/3 columns, and 1 parity space of 4 disks, 4 columns.
I can gradually cut/paste my data from my 3col space to my 4col space, and grow my 4col as space clears up on my 3col.
Screenshot of the 2 "spaces" and the command I used to create the 4column virtual disk:
BUT: it is saying "low on space, add 3 disks". If this is a 4 column space, and I built it on 4 disks, shouldn't it be asking for 4 disks?
Did I do this all wrong?
Do I need to buy another hard drive, move all my crap to it, and just nuke this entire pool? I really don't want to do that, because I am afraid of having all my data on a single disk during the transition. A single, NEW disk.
Is my "create a second storage space and migrate data over" I was attempting a valid approach? Dangerous and cheap?
More...