I cannot use any new Storage Spaces I create from my Storage Pool

Several years ago I purchased 2 refurbished Hitachi drives, installed them in my PC and used Windows Storage Space feature to configure them as a Storage Pool with 1 Simple Space and 1 Mirrored Space like so:
This set-up remained the same, even though I removed the drives from inside my PC and put them in a dual HDD enclosure, and also when I upgraded from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. I am able to write to and read from these existing Storage Spaces, without problems.

Now, however, I want to make a third storage space from same pool, to experiment with BitLocker - mainly to see how badly it hurts performance:

After it finishes creating the new Storage Space, it gives me an error:

The new Storage Space appears in Storage Space UI (from Control Panel):

But not in File Explorer:

Which makes it completely useless, as far as I can tell.

Attempting to delete the new Storage Space repeats the same error given when the space was created, attempting to change the Storage Space gives a different error:

I am able to delete these useless spaces via Powershell method found in one of Brink's tutorials, but I would rather be able to make a functional new Storage Space. Anyone know how to fix this?

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I just checked, and I think Disk Management shows the new Storage Space as Disk 8.

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A bit more: right-clicking on Disk 8 in Disk Management's UI, brings up more options which led me to this tab:

The text in the box at the bottom in full is:
Device STORAGE\Disk\{41546632-4b54-40e7-9961-15d5ccdb3843} was not migrated due to partial or ambiguous match.Last Device Instance Id: USBSTOR\Disk&Ven_&Prod_&Rev_PMAP\070165E12DFCF469&0Class Guid: {4d36e967-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}Location Path: Migration Rank: 0xF0008000FFFFF120Present: falseStatus: 0xC0000719

Hi there
@yu gnomi

I think Storage spaces are a bit of a problem in Windows

You might try creating Dymanic disks and then having a go with it.

Personally I'd avoid using Storage spaces on Windows like the plague --they aren't reliable and break easily. Often they fail even when updating to a new Windows release.

You'd be far better off using a decent (difficult to find at consumer level) hardware RAID card or for "Aggregate Disks" use a Linux type of NAS server and use MDADM as a decent software RAID manager to share / stripe HDD's etc.

Here I've got 4 HDD's running as a single RAID 0 (really fast I/O but you need to ensure you take backup since if any disk in the array fails you lose the whole thing with RAID 0) and it gives me a good 20 TB as composite shareable data storage - on Linux HDD's can be aggregated without having to be the same size either).



This NAS has run for over 24 months without any HDD problems and is on usually 24/7 -- only re-booted if I need to upgrade hardware etc.



Cheers
jimbo

yu gnomi:

In Disk Mgmt you can see the volume at Disk8 has no filesystem and no drive letter. Try to assign drive letter and format the existing volume as NTFS in Disk Mgmt Console instead of Storage Spaces applet. Paste the error msg (if any) here.

And fyi: Windows needs RAID (software) file systems

muchomurka said:

yu gnomi:

In Disk Mgmt you can see the volume at Disk8 has no filesystem and no drive letter. Try to assign drive letter and format the existing volume as NTFS in Disk Mgmt Console instead of Storage Spaces applet. Paste the error msg (if any) here.

And fyi: Windows needs RAID (software) file systems

When I assign it a drive letter, it prompts me to format the volume. I did not do this out of fear that some of the data in other spaces might get wiped out.

The drive now appears in File Explorer, but without a bar showing how empty/full it is.

Any way to know for sure if it is safe to format the volume? (Other than simply going ahead and formatting and finding out the hard way of course.)

I never lost data at other volumes while formatting particular one, but if you want to be safe, make full data backup before doing it.

Currently using Macrium Reflect to back up both existing Storage Spaces to an external HDD that was mostly empty, but will be significantly less empty when the back-up is done. It will be around another 6 hours before that is done.

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Update: Back-up image finished and taking up 1.5 TB on a 2TB external HDD;
I formatted the new volume from File Explorer (Quick Format);
I checked a fairly wide sample of files from the 2 original Storage Space volumes, and all that I checked seemed completely intact;
and I copied some files to the new volume, and was able to read from them normally.

I will keep the back-up image for a week or so, just to be sure, but everything seems to be working as I wanted. Marking this thread as solved.