Windows 8 storage spaces. A question.

[Gdourado]

Hello, how are you?
I am thinking about using windows storage spaces to create a large storage pool with parity protection against a single drive failure.
I want to have a large volume to keep the video collection.
My question is:
When creating a new pool with 3 drives and parity, do all the 3 drives need to be formatted? Or can one of them have data and the data will be preserved and converted to the storage pool?
I have a 3 tg drive full that I would like to add to the pool with data. Is it possible?

Cheers and thanks.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, Gdourado!

From what I understand you want to create parity using Storage spaces in Windows.
No matter what you do when you are tempering with storage solutions, the data back-up is a must!
However, when talking about parity, it requires at least 3 HDDs/SSDs to be created.
So you cannot create it with just 2 drives and then add the third one.
A Storage Space operates at the block level by splitting files across disks (instead of at the file level). This makes it impossible to add unformatted disks to the pool without losing the data stored on them. When adding a disk to the pool, it is initialized and formatted, thus importing data by adding the HDD does not work. 🙁
I'd suggest to back up your data on another storage device/platform and then create your Storage space with parity. This will format all your 3 drives and then you will be able to transfer the data to them safely.

Hope I helped!
SuperSoph_WD