Questions about "Storage Spaces"

Hi everyone, I'm using Win 7 and use Disk manager to span my 5 HDD's together into one drive. Been doing this for years. I am interested in using Storage Spaces (SS) to gain the benefit of parity. I just can't find the answers to these questions. Thank for helping.

1. Are there any improvements in SS from Win10 from Win8?
2. I'm confused about setting the max size. If you set the max size beyond the amount of actual size you have, this allows you to add more drives at a later point in time? But what if you set the max size exactly the same as the actual size? Are you not allowed to increase storage then? If so, why not just make the max size like 500TB? I don't understand this option.
3. Is there still no way to re-balance data on the pool? If you add a new drive to the pool, it won't auto-balance the data?
4. Does it auto-balance data as you fill up the pool starting from scratch?
5. If a drive dies, how do you know exactly which drive to take out of your computer?
6. Last (probably not), I have heard some talk about wasted space using the parity option. I currently have an array of these disks: 5TB, 4TB, 2TB, 2TB, 2TB. Is there some way to know how much usable space I would have with a parity setup?

btw, I have an exact same disk array that I use as a backup in an eSATA box. 30TB total. I would be willing to mix and match drives from these two arrays if a certain combination yielded better space savings.

Thanks again.

anyone? If you only know a couple answers, I'd accept that too.

Well, after installing Win10 and trying it out, my write speeds with a parity setup were around 15MB/s. Way too slow. With 10TB of data to copy over, that would take me 8 days. I really wanted ReFS too for the data-rot protection and was bummed after realizing this isn't available with parity setups. Oh well. On to try out unRAID.