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I've been trying to create mirrored drives using two Seagate 5 TB drives ( Disks 4 & 5 ) that have the same available space. All goes well until I get to the very last step and I get the error message "The operation is not supported by the object." Is there something I'm doing wrong? I start with two drives whose space is unallocated and follow what the "wizard" tells me to do.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
After a relatively short chat session with Microsoft Support I received confirmation that mirroring, storage spaces, and storage pools are not supported on external disk drives. For anyone reading my final post here's a piece of advice. Be cautious in assuming that tutorials and other posted information are correct and haven't left out critical pieces of information.
I guess I need to ask a very basic question. Is it actually possible to make two external drives connected via USB ports into a mirrored drive / volume? I ask because I've found one place in the Microsoft help information that says it can't, yet all of the non-Microsoft sources I've looked at don't mention a limitation and just demonstrate how to do it.
I'm really curious why Windows 11 requires internal disk drives for setting up a RAID 1 configuration. While some people might want to do that and would probably get better performance with internal drives, using external drives is advantageous for me and likely lots of other users. I have a large collection of photos for which I want to maintain a continuously up to date backup copy. And I want that backup copy on an external disk so that I can at a moment's notice remove it from the system and take it somewhere else. I might want to take it to a bank vault for safe storage, then attach another disk to replace it in the RAID configuration which would then over several hours re-populate that drive with the files from the primary. Or I might take it to another computer for some reason, or just "grab it and run" if I'm in an environmentally challenging situation -- storm, fire, earthquake, etc. Having internal drives makes responding quickly to any of these environmental challenges impossible and resulting in total loss of the up to date files.
I'm quite disappointed that none of the material that I've found or been given states that Windows 11 is not capable of supporting RAID 1 with external drives. All the "help" material makes it sound like a simple thing to do with step by step instructions -- that don't work the way the author thought.
After two weeks of trying to get what I need and now concluding that I have exhausted all avenues for solutions from the Microsoft Community and Microsoft Learn, and have not found a way to get to a Microsoft developer who would actually know, I guess my next step is to see what Dell will suggest. I do know that my computer's BIOS supports RAID configurations and maybe they have a solution that will address my needs.
The first 4 stages went quickly without anything that looked bad being reported. Stage 5 would have taken hours and hours to finish so I had to terminate chkdsk.
Hello,
Thank you for your reply and providing Information.
After format of both of your Drive. Please try to run check disk on both of your drive to check if there is any Bad sectors or Bad blocks on the disks.
C:> chkdsk /f /r <DriveLetter>
Best Regards,
Prakash
