Recover storage spaces pool?

[wuubb]

I made a striped array with 4 Samsung 1TB SSDs in storage spaces in Windows 10. At last boot up, the combined drive doesn't appear in file explorer. Going to disk management say I need to initialize disk, but either MBR or GPT results in "Windows cannot find specified file" error.

From what I've read this is usually due to drive failure, yet the drives are only a few months old and all show as healthy and no errors when checked with HD Tune (recommended from these forums). What's very odd is that if I unplug a drive, all of a sudden the pool appears in Storage spaces control panel with a connection error. Plugging in the drive again makes the error go away and then the whole thing disappears. Except for 1 drive, which no matter what I do (unplug/replug) still has an error.

I do have a backup of the data, but it is 4TB worth and I'd rather not have to sit for hours while it copies over. Is it possible to recover the pool? Is that 1 SSD actually defective and needs to be RMA'd?

 

[ingtar33]

first of all,

And I really have to say this diplomatically. but the chance of RAID 0 failure (aka stripping) is the square of the number of drives involved. Meaning if a normal SSD has a 2% chance of failure over the course of one year, with 4 drives in the array, you'd have a 4^2 = 16*2% = 32% chance of failure of the stripped drive in just one year.

Secondly, windows disk stripping (software raid 0) is almost 3 times more likely to fail then hardware RAID0.

Third, the reason why many people don't considering disk stripping aka RAID0 to be RAID at all is there is no redundancy. Meaning one drive fails and you lose the whole thing. no recovery possible.

Finally, it is extremely RARE a computer can take advantage of the added performance gain from just 2 SSDs in RAID0 (in fact it's debatable if there IS any real performance gain that the end user would notice in any situation outside of a HEAVY IO server environment).

BTW: Its pretty much impossible to recover a broken RAID0 setup. If you want improved performance from RAID plus some of the redundancy, set up those drives in a hardware RAID 5 or 6, or even a 1+0. But don't do a hardware RAID0 or software windows disk striping. I don't know if you have a failed drive. But I do know software RAID is kind of junk.

 

[wuubb]

first of all,

And I really have to say this diplomatically. but the chance of RAID 0 failure (aka stripping) is the square of the number of drives involved. Meaning if a normal SSD has a 2% chance of failure over the course of one year, with 4 drives in the array, you'd have a 4^2 = 16*2% = 32% chance of failure of the stripped drive in just one year.

Secondly, windows disk stripping (software raid 0) is almost 3 times more likely to fail then hardware RAID0.

Third, the reason why many people don't considering disk stripping aka RAID0 to be RAID at all is there is no redundancy. Meaning one drive fails and you lose the whole thing. no recovery possible.

Finally, it is extremely RARE a computer can take advantage of the added performance gain from just 2 SSDs in RAID0 (in fact it's debatable if there IS any real performance gain that the end user would notice in any situation outside of a HEAVY IO server environment).

BTW: Its pretty much impossible to recover a broken RAID0 setup. If you want improved performance from RAID plus some of the redundancy, set up those drives in a hardware RAID 5 or 6, or even a 1+0. But don't do a hardware RAID0 or software windows disk striping. I don't know if you have a failed drive. But I do know software RAID is kind of junk.

I honestly did not know those calculations for disk failure, or that the Windows software raid has such a higher failure rate. I really just wanted to have all the drives appear as one so that I wouldn't have to keep shuffling data around but I AFAIK there isn't a way to do that, but I suppose I'll have to change my setup and just keep them separate.

 

[USAFRet]

Multiple drives does NOT mean having to shuffle data around. The OS can access stuff on any drive as needed.

My system has 5 SSD's, each designated for a specific use.
OS+applications, photo work, 3d/CAD/Video, Games and other junk, pagefile, scratch space....

In addition, my backup routine backs up each drive individually. So that if a single drive were to ever die or otherwise become corrupted, just recover that data.


Performance of RAID 0 + SSD:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

NVMe drives is even worse:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-256gb-raid-report,4449.html