Windows Storage Pool Problem

Combat squirrel · 11 Apr 2013 at 12:30

As title im running a storage pool on windows 8 with 5x2tb drives giving a real space usage of ~9tb.

The drive got full (mistake of something being duplicated), and I deleted the unneeded files....and from 'my computer' it is now correctly showing that ~4tb of data is on the drive..........

However storage spaces is still reporting the drive is full from the control panel?! :confused:

... iv googled but cannot find much of anything relevent.

So My computer reports the drive has ~4tb on it, storage spaces control panel is reporting its still full at ~9tb, how do I fix this ?

Combat squirrel · 11 Apr 2013 at 18:10

Anyone?

Django x2 · 11 Apr 2013 at 21:35

Reboot? not sure. Might just be a bug. I guess you can move data to the drive accordingly?

ecksmen · 12 Apr 2013 at 21:34

Storage spaces works by pooling disks together, this is the simple element of it. It then creates a virtual disk ontop of the physical disks, spreading the load between the pool of physicals disks depending on what type of disk you choose - single, two way mirror, three way mirror or parity.

The virtual disk by default is thin provisioned, allocating space as you need it. You've grown the file system, which has expanded the virtual disk consuming resources from the storage space. The file system within the virtual disk has free space.

You may be able to shrink the virtual disk, but I've no experience of this. As I understand it, while they're similar to the virtual disks of hyper V and the like it's different with the parity / mirroring element (columns) so shrinking may not be an option.

Have you seen my thread about enabling deduplication?

n30_mkii · 16 Apr 2013 at 19:54

I have come across this on server 2012. My thoughts are that you've got data deduplication setup? If so when you delete large amounts of data, it is potentially not recovered fully until the dedupe routine maintenance kicks in. If I remember rightly its the garbage collection that should resolve the issue which runs once a week.

Its possible to force it through using powershell e.g

Start-DedupJob drive: –Type GarbageCollection

There is another cmdlet I can't think of which does some other block retrieval for no longer referenced items. You will probably of found by now the issue has resolved itself, but worth a note to anyone who uses pools with deduplication.

Combat squirrel · 20 Jun 2013 at 13:37

Thanks people.

Know its a old thread revival, the dedup worked over night thankfully.

However a new problem now! :/ lol

I am having real issue with windows server 2012 standard I got on a backup PC I am building.

In short when reviewing primordial drives, only *some* of them appear, I have tracked the issue down to it only showing drives and only allowing the use of drives attached to the same controller (which removes the point of having storage spaces in the 1st place for me), I have found work around guides of forcing storage spaces via powershell but this just failed to create the storage space correctly (via pools and virtual drives etc etc)

I can at most create a 4 x 2tb storage space, but I want to create an 8 x 2tb drive space across 2 controllers.

Weirdly my 5 drive storage space on my windows 8 work machine works just fine across different controllers (3 attached via RAID and 2 via SAS)

Any clues? I am almost certain its a bug, but why on earth have MS not sorted this yet? Its a pretty critical problem.

Combat squirrel · 22 Jun 2013 at 20:49

Anyone?

BlizzardX · 23 Jun 2013 at 11:15

While I cannot help with your issue, I can sympathise... I had immense trouble with Storage Pools on my WS2012E media server... Ended up using Drive Bender instead as it at least can balance the drives across the discs!

MS need to do a lot to fix Storage Pools as at the moment it is pretty poor on both W8 and the 2012 server range.