Help needed with 3 different size SSDs please

darrenkarp · 9 Feb 2023 at 11:50

Hi All,

Over the last few years I have added additional SSDs as I ran out of space so currently have the following installed in my rig. A Samsung 840 EVO 250GB, 860 EVO 500GB and a 870 EVO 1TB. Is there a way I can amalgamate all 3 drives into 1 large drive?

Cheers
Daz

Mcnumpty2323 · 9 Feb 2023 at 13:08

Yep
I do exactly that with mine now I have 5 x m2 drives
I shove all my sata ssds into a pool
Use windows storage spaces
Unlike raid it doesn't care if drives are different sizes
You don't lose space
It's very resilient and versatile
You can add sata drives or m2 drives or combination of both
Can have it simple to get maximum size
Or with redundancy

darrenkarp · 9 Feb 2023 at 16:41

Thanks but don't the drives need to be wiped / formatted before / during these process? All my 3 SSDs have data on them.

Snapshot · 10 Feb 2023 at 07:58

The Microsoft article on Storage Spaces doesn't say anything about that which is unhelpful. But, if necessary, you restore the data from your backup. If you don't have a backup then the data must have no value to you.

Bubo · 10 Feb 2023 at 08:35

Just poking my nose in about this Storage Space thing with banging a bunch of disks together. I have a very similar range of ssds to the OP, which I guess will all have different performance speeds. When you do do this amalgamation does it matter that they may have different read/write speeds, does it default to the slowest drive out of the lot etc?

OspreyO · 10 Feb 2023 at 16:25

What happens if one fails.

Snapshot · 11 Feb 2023 at 08:22

One of the options is to configure a mirror (similar to RAID1) so you're protected from a single drive failure. https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb...-windows-b6c8b540-b8d8-fb8a-e7ab-4a75ba11f9f2 will answer the basic questions about Storage Spaces.

Mcnumpty2323 · 19 Feb 2023 at 16:38

sorry no idea why didnt get notified of replies
yes they get formatted during set up @darrenkarp
@Bubo you get bursts higher than the speed of the slowest drive
@osprey same idea as raid it depends if you set it up with redundancy or not

edit
unlike motherboard hardware raid
even if you change motherboard your storage pool will
still be there
likewise reinstalling windows it will still be there
unless you delete/format the pool during setup i guess
i have never tried that to see what happens
it uses refs filesystem its very resilient
used storage spaces for many years and only ever had it get corrupted once
but i dont rely on 1 back up strategy
so everything on the storage pool i have other copies just in case