Storage Space phantom data

Question

Hi All, first time poster and all that, so please tell me if I'm doing something wrong.

I have a problem with Storage Spaces, which honestly from google searches sounds like it could be the tagline for Storage Spaces.

Initially, I had 4x 8Tb hard drives and I decided to make a nearly 32Tb simple (no parity etc) storage space with this. I let it set its own maximum, and it did nothing to warn me that I wouldn't be able to add additional drives to take the maximum beyond 31.8Tb, because it uses a default cluster size.

Anyway, I added a 5th drive, and hit upon the problem, so I removed the 5th drive from the space, created a new storage space with the intention of copying over 8Tb of data, then removing a drive from pool 1 and adding it to pool 2, repeated.

I created this second pool with a much greater maximum size (I wanted to make a 100Tb one, but was told this was not allowed... limitation of Windows 10 not using 64K cluster sizes?), anyway, I created the new one to be around 60Tb with one usable 8Tb drive. I copied 8Tb of data to it from my existing storage space, and I can't remove any drives from it.

Whilst Windows reports that I have 15.4Tb of used space with 16.4Tb available, and 31.8Tb total, The Storage space utility reports that 23.3Tb of the 29.1Tb pool capacity has been used.

Can anyone give me a reasonable explanation as to where this additional space has gone, and more to the point, how should I proceed with non-destructively creating a single virtual drive that is at least as big as 5x8Tb?

This shows the phenomenon: https://i.imgur.com/IOlqSxi.png

Answer 1

Hi Pyro900,

We appreciate that you post this query in Microsoft Community. We would be so glad if we can help, however, the community has a very limited support/resources about generating phantom space in Windows 10. 

On what we've understood, a GPT type of hard drives for Windows 10 can have 128 partitions, each with max 18 exabytes (~18.8 million terabytes of space). See more here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/hard-drives-and-partitions.

But then, we may still have to consider the following:

• Overall hardware: the power required for it to run, the memory of your PC, the core processor (CPU), and if the motherboard will be able to support the said size of storage drive.
• The OS bit version (64 and 32 bit), and the software that is being used to read a massive storage size.

Further support, more accurate and reliable information about the said query, please post the same thread on Social TechNet.  

Kind regards.