how to move storage pool

Question

My question is similar --- but not quite the same as the one that lead me here.

I had a WIN 10 system with 4 HDDs in a storage pool. System died and cannot be repaired. Appears all 4 HDDs are OK.

How can I either move all 4 to a new system, and have my storage pool available.

IF THAT IS NOT POSSIBLE

Is there any way to recover the data so I can at least move it to the new system.

Sort of defeats the purpose if nothing can be recovered if the system dies.

Thanks, and do keep answer simple. I am not very technical.

Robert

Solution

Obligatory reminder: ALWAYS DO YOUR BACKUPS BEFORE PLAYING WITH REAL DATA

Yes. You can move the Storage Space to new hardware, as it's just a Software RAID like other software RAIDs. Make sure they're all plugged in properly before switching the machine on.

The catch is that Windows needs to know how to talk to the drives. If you're connecting this to a standard SATA or IDE bus on your motherboard, then you should have no issue. However, if your disks are connected by something more fancy, like an external disk housing, or through an eSATA or SATA multiplier, SAS, SATA card, etc., then you may have a device driver issue accessing the disk before loading the Storage Space.

Because this is a Software RAID, there is a susceptibility to software-hardware errors such as disk read timeouts* and split brain scenarios**. This is why you should always make sure you have a backup somewhere before playing with your RAID.

More info on Storage Spaces (a.k.a. Storage Pools) can be found here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12438/windows-10-storage-spaces

*RAID software can accidentally mark a disk as faulty because the drive decides to take longer than 7 seconds to reply while it repairs a sector, for example.

**Some disks may start up slightly faster than others, resulting in a single active pool being perceived as two "degraded" pools, for example.

Comments

[Jacob Evans]

Storage pool... What does that mean. With great detail preferably.

[tu-Reinstate Monica-dor duh]

Welcome to ServerFault! What question led you here? It may help to link to it for us to understand context and avoid marking your question as duplicate.

[tu-Reinstate Monica-dor duh]

@JacobEvans Storage Pools a.k.a. Storage Spaces is the Windows equivalent of a Software RAID. First introduced in Windows 8 IIRC. windowscentral.com/how-use-storage-spaces-windows-10

[tu-Reinstate Monica-dor duh]

cough Welcome to SuperUser! It may help to link to the question that led you here to provide context (and migrate that question also, if applicable!) :-p

[Sir Adelaide]

you said you can move the storage space to new hardware, but didn't really give many details of how or what steps to take. Is it ok to set up the new system first with it's own hard disk and windows install, then plug these four in? Or should these four disks be the only disks added to a new computer, and hope the new bios can start windows from them?

[tu-Reinstate Monica-dor duh]

@SirAdelaide Either. Just like software RAID, a Storage Space is interchangeable. It can be a boot or non-boot disk and previously-boot-enabled disks can be connected to an existing machine as a non-boot disk. Obviously, the catch there is having 2 virtual volumes that can boot may make booting unpredictable as BIOSes aren't great with these things. I didn't give details of how specifically because the OP has not specified their hardware. Explaining how to unplug and plug in disks is a little beyond the expectation of an answer for this question and worthy of a separate question.

[sootsnoot]

I realize this question is a little over a year old and this stuff has undergone some changes in Win10 (and might be different in different editions of Win10). But AFAIK, your boot disk cannot be in a Win10 storage space, at least not with the Home Edition.

[tu-Reinstate Monica-dor duh]

@sootsnoot Good grief no. You can't do anything with Home Edition. Everything is crippled in some way in Home Edition.

[sootsnoot]

@tudor I can believe that's true, but is there a way to find out specifically what's different about storage spaces in Home Edition? Are you saying that Professional Edition allows a storage space to be booted? At any rate, I've been using storage spaces in Home Edition for a few weeks now (simple mirroring of a pair of 2TB data disks that I use for storing Macrium Reflect backups and big videos), and it seems to work pretty well and is not unduly slow.