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New to Storage Spaces - I am lost if I have configured it correctly

cn flag
RTM

I would very much appreciate your help!

I am new to Storage Spaces and RAID in general and I would like to have a fail-safe drive configuration using 3 drives - 1x4TB and 2x2TB on a Windows Server 2022 Datacenter Server.

As far as my understandings go, this drive configuration should be sufficient to achieve no data loss in case 1 of the drives fail.

So far I have configured a Storage Spaces Pool with the 3 disks and made one VHD with the full capacity - VHD made via PowerShell since the GUI threw up an error - as far as I understand, this is an bug occurring since Server 2019 which should not prevent the creation of a VHD in SS.

The PowerShell command in use to create the VHD was:

PS C:\Users\Administrator> New-VirtualDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName "SP1" -FriendlyName "SP1VHD1" -Size 3718GB -ProvisioningType Fixed -ResiliencySettingName "Parity" -NumberOfDataCopies 1.

-NumberOfDataCopies was set to 1 since it appears I had no other option.

The VHD was made successfully and I have a ReFS partition already.

When I run Get-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName SP1VHD1| ft FriendlyName, NumberOfColumns, NumberOfDataCopies

I get:

FriendlyName ------------ SP1VHD1 NumberOfColumns--------------- 3 NumberOfDataCopies ------------------ 1

My question is more of a verification type - have I managed to configure it correctly and can I expect, in case of, let's say 1 of the 2TB Drives failure or even a failure of the 4TB one for no data loss?

Thanks in advance for any help!

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Mikael H avatar
br flag
Mikael H
It’s a good practice never to mix sizes in a storage solution. If you need 4TB equivalent of storage, get two 4TB drives (or four 2TB drives for increased I/O capacity) and mirror them.
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br flag
Chopper3
Also don't use R5 with large HDDs, it's borderline dangerous, use R1/10 or R6/60.
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cn flag
RTM
I understand that ideally it will be best to use identical drives and I actually have 2 brand new 4TBs and 4 used 2TBs drives for this project, but wanted to max out the space while using the new disks for different data. The concept of choosing 1x4+2x2 in 1 SS+the same config in another is that the data stored is not of such a high importance and this configuration would allow me near 8TBs of storage while 2x4TB of it will have a brand new hardware to rely on and use the 2x2 as a backup in case of a disk loss. The 4TBs are WD DataCenter disks, I feel pretty safe of not loosing them soon.
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cn flag
RTM
p.s. Maybe my concept is wrong and I would be happy to hear why is not a good practice of mixing different size of storage, since while researching on Storage Spaces I found out it's a common case of using different size of drives.
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yagmoth555 avatar Server
cn flag
yagmoth555

In parity mode you can loose one drive.

To note as you mixed disk size you loose 2 TB out of the 4 TB disk, as the two other are 2TB. That act like 3 x 2TB disk at the moment.

You could check via;

Get-VirtualDisk | Select-Object FriendlyName,HealthStatus, OperationalStatus, DetachedReason

Please refer to that article for more information; Troubleshoot Storage Spaces and Storage Spaces Direct health and operational states

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cn flag
RTM
Thanks! I already checked the disk health and it turned out being "Healthy". But this spoke little to me. I'd assume the configuration is proper in that case. I saw that only 2TBs of the 4TB HDD are in use, but yet I do have a little less than 4TBs of storage to fill-up, so I am okay with that. Thanks for the confirmation!
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