Help: Multiple Storage Spaces Conflict with Each Other After Storage Spaces Upgrade

Question

I recently upgraded to Windows 11 and was prompted to upgrade my Storage Spaces which I did a few weeks later. I am running four Storage Spaces which I've been doing for several years without issue. Each Storage Space is a pool of four hard drives contained in an external ProBox. Each ProBox connects to my new computer motherboard using its USB 3.0 ports. This setup has run flawlessly for many years on my older computer running both Windows 8 & 10. It also ran fine on my new computer until I upgraded Storage Spaces to Windows 11. After doing that I started having severe problems.

After the upgrade of Storage Spaces, I am now unable to run all four Storage Spaces at the same time. When I do, I have a variety of issues as follows:

1. One or more Storage Spaces reports drive(s) have failed
2. One Storage Space will report as completely gone without even the Drive Letter assigned and the only option presented is to delete the pool
3. No Storage Spaces show as existing for a couple minutes and then one appears and then disappears over and over

If I shutdown Windows 11 (which automatically powers off all ProBoxes), I can restart my computer and power up any ONE single ProBox and all is fine (even the ones that previously reported as being completely gone.

As a result, I'm pretty certain there's a conflict between my Storage Spaces. I'm just not sure where to look or what to do about this short of deleting all of them and rebuilding one by one, which would take weeks to re-copy over the data from my backups. I would greatly appreciate any help/feedback anyone can provide regarding this issue.

Best Regards,

inouridr

Answer 1

It's been a few days since I wrote my original Question and since I haven't heard back from anyone, I thought I would share my findings after a great deal of experimentation.

My findings are that Windows 11 does not properly support more than two storage pools. The clear sign of this is when you are creating the third pool in Storage Spaces, you will see on the screen a message saying that Windows 11 is attempting to delete a Storage Space. This ultimately results in a failure but your Storage Space will show as having been created.

The reality is this third storage pool is in some way being confused by Windows 11 as one of the other two pools. I learned this after deleting my original Windows 10 pools (which I had upgraded to Windows 11) and recreating as Windows 11 pools. The result of doing this was the same as before. Pools would vanish, report as having drive failures/errors, etc.

I did state something incorrectly on my original post. I said everything was fine prior to the upgrade of my pools to Windows 11. This has proven to be untrue. I know that now after having to abandon recreation of my pools directly in Windows 11. My next effort was to go back to my old Windows 10 server and attempt to recreated the pools (as Windows 10 pools). I next moved each pool over to Windows 11 server (but did not upgrade them) to copy over the data from my backups. What I found was the Windows 10 pools are more stable under Windows 11 OS (at least in appearance in Storage Spaces), but as soon as you start doing read/writes to the pool, the same issues start happening.

As a result, I am now left with the only option of having two Storage Space pools and making the other two RAID - 1 Mirrors. This is far more restrictive due to the limit of two drives per array and that both drives really need to be the same capacity. Unfortunately I'm not even sure this will work as I should mention all my Pro Box drive enclosures connect to my server using USB 3.0. You can't create RAID arrays with drives connected via USB. I found a post that said you can create the RAID via SATA connection and then move the array to a USB connection and it will work. Only time will tell if that's true. I should know in the next day or so; formatting of a RAID - 1 mirror is incredibly slow! (likely 8-10 hours for two 8 TB drives).