Breaking Two-way Mirror

Question

As I understand it, a Two-way mirror storage pool is just 2 drives with the same data on it. I would like to remove one of the drives to use in another computer. Is it as simple as removing one drive and putting it in the new one and reformatting? And keeping the data in the current computer intact? Thanks!

Answer 1

There should be a button "Change Setting" at the to right corner. After u clicked on it you might be prompted for UAC (click yes). Now you get the options to prepare a drive for removal (next to the physical drive) to prepare it for removal from the pool. Leave your PC plugged in until the drive is ready to be removed. This can take quite some time depending on the data. Next when the drive has been repaired to be removed you get the option to remove the drive. Click on "remove" and the drive will be removed from the pool.

The pool will still exist but you will have removed the drive.

(If the reply was helpful please don't forget to accept as answer, thank you)

Answer 2

I really the help, but I'm not seeing that Remove option. I've seen pages where it says to do that. Not sure why I don't have that option. And yes, I'm admin and clicked Change Settings and yes to UAC.

Hopefully this screenshot can shed some light.

• PowerShell shows Number 4 and 5 as the 2 drives I'm trying to split up
• Storage Pool shows the 2 drives also, but no option to remove them
• Files show that it's one drive.

I thought there would be some easy way since they're just mirrors.

Answer 3

Hi,

I would like to remove one of the drives to use in another computer. Is it as simple as removing one drive and putting it in the new one and reformatting? And keeping the data in the current computer intact? Thanks!

A two-way mirror storage space requires at least two drives. We are unable to remove one disk in the two- way mirror storage pool.

If you want to split the two disks, please migrate the data to a third disk then rebuild the storage pool.

I tested in my lab:

Steps below:

Use powershell command to retire one physical disk: Get-PhysicalDisk, Set-PhysicalDisk -FriendlyName "Microsoft Virtual Disk 1" -Usage Retired

Then run command: Repair-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName 'My Virtual Disk'

Monitor the progression of the process by typing the following command: Get-StorageJob

Once everything is done, remove the disk from the pool with this command: Remove-PhysicalDisk -FriendlyName 'PhysicalDiskXX'. And get the following error message:

Thanks for your time!
Best Regards,
Anne

-----------------------------

If the Answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it.

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.