windows 8 - Replace disk in simple storage space

06
2014-04
  • Tycho91

    Is there a way to replace a disk in a storage space without partition on a W8.1 system?

    I want to replace a 1.5TB drive with a 3TB drive but I don't have any spare sata ports. I do have enough space to move all the data on the 1.5TB drive to the other drives but I can't seem to find any option to "evict" all the data from the drive.

    Moving ALL the data to an external harddrive is not an option because the pool is over 10TB and I would have to buy 10TB worth of harddrives to do so.

    I know this would be easy if I had parity, but I don't.

    EDIT: The data is pooled using Windows Storage Spaces (hence the tag). It's a "simple" storage space so no parity or resilience of any kind.

    • Answers
  • cybernard 
    How about a USB to SATA adapter?
An internal pci-e card with extra SATA ports?
SATA expander turn 1 port into 4 (down side =shared bandwidth)

    Either of these work for you?

    First, I don't know if you have a software, hardware, or how you have these drive pooled together. The controller might not like this idea, but it the only idea I have come up with so far.

    Then cloning with a sector level copier. If you have a second spare PC around that would be handy. Turn everything off and don't turn it back on till the new drive is in place. Take the new drive and an old drive to spare PC. Get a bootable linux CD such as partedmagic. Then use dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512 conv=sync,noerror Where sda = 1.5tb and sdb =3tb hard drive. This will take hours. When it is done you should be able to attach the 3tb drive into the other hard drives connector.

    If you weren't living on borrowed time, I would say back everything up to CrashPlan **an online, unlimited cloud storage provider. It is about $9.99 a month or less for multi-year plans.


    • Related Question

    How do I replace a harddrive that is in a two-way mirror storage space on Windows 8?
  • Jon

    I have a storage space in Windows 8 doing a two-way mirror on three harddrives. The sizes are 297GB, 189GB, and 70GB. I would like to replace the 70GB HD with a larger one. My thought was to remove that drive from the space via the Storage Space control panel, shutdown, replace HD with bigger drive, reboot, add new HD to the storage space.

    I can't find any options to remove a HD from a storage space in the control panel. Should I just shutdown and swap out the small drive or is there another process for safely replacing the old HD? (By the way, the old HD is still operational.)


    • Related Answers
  • Jon

    Here is what I found on the Building Windows 8 blog:

    Q) How do I replace a working drive with a bigger one (or just cycle drives)? Does it require a “rebuild”?

    As long as you have created mirrored or parity spaces, you can always simply remove a physical disk within the pool, and add a different (perhaps larger) one. Within a short period of time, the impacted spaces will automatically be resynchronized (the Storage Spaces design optimizes this operation to be faster than traditional RAID rebuilds). You can determine whether all spaces are healthy – i.e. data has been resynchronized so as to maintain the designated number of copies –either via Control Panel or via PowerShell commands.

    Virtualizing storage for scale, resiliency, and efficiency

    So, my understanding is to just pull the drive, replace, and let it do its thing.

  • Mike

    If your mirror is setup with the 297GB drive mirrored to the 189GB+70GB, you could break the mirror, replace the 70GB drive and recreate the mirror. I would suggest replacing the 70GB drive with something larger than 297GB so that you are not mirroring onto JBOD.

    Please confirm the configuration of the mirror before removing any drive. You can find this out by the capacity of the logical volume; it should be less than 189+70 (259GB). If that is correct, you should have no problems performing the swap. If instead, your logical volume is 189+70+297 (556GB), you actually have a JBOD array, not a mirror. This means no redundancy, and removing any drive from the array would provide complete data loss. For this scenario, use a disk cloning utility (ghost/dd) to clone the data to the larger replacement drive and then create a RAID1 mirror from that drive to your other drives.