Expanding / adding disks RAID 10

Not sure where to post this. I have windows 10 Pro. I'm about to upgrade my RAID and am going with (4) 8TB HGST He's

I am presently using (4) 6TB WD red NAS drives in windows Storage Spaces utilizing a two-way mirror and it's my understanding it can only withstand 1 drive failure. I would like to be able withstand 2 drive failures, granted the 2nd drive failure needs to be the correct one to not break the raid, and also want to take advantage of the speed of RAID 10.

I purchased a SAS controller and plan to do a software raid in windows disk manager so if the controller fails I do not have to worry about getting the same controller. I do not care about the CPU load.

I am wondering if the disk manager in Windows (not Storage Spaces) can support expanding RAID 10 so I can add disks later, or if I'll need to migrate it later....at which point i guess I'd just order more drives now, but was trying to save money by being able to add drives later when this RAID starts to fill up - just like you can add drives to storage spaces.

Thanks all!

Hi there

This article shows how to do it

How to set up RAID in Windows 10 - Windows 10 - Toms Hardware

Software RAID in Windows is actually called Storage spaces but they DO actually work efficiently and can dynamically handle the equivalent of software RAID 10 via Mirroring . Resiliency and Striping.

Windows was never good for software raid - but these days unless you have expensive SAS controllers and the HDD's to go with them Software RAID is usually far better than using cheapish consumer grade RAID controllers and HDD's.

Without using Storage spaces you can use Spanned volumes which treats the whole HDD setup as "JBOD" i.e just a bunch of Disks but whether you can dynamically add more to a spanned volume set -- don't know --it's been ages since I used these.

These days also the chances of multiple HDD failures are so small that unless you are running something that can NEVER EVER fail with disastrous consequences I wouldn't bother with DOUBLE protection on the arrays -- but of course YMMV.

I'm actually using 2 RAID 0 arrays of 2 HDD's in each array of 2 X 4TB - speed is blazingly fast -- I'm not worried about losing data as I back up the stuff regularly. Of course some people get a bit scared at the idea of RAID 0 but as I've said these days HDD's are eminently reliable - especially for a HOME or non commercial network. Been running this as a NAS server with CENTOS 7 as the OS. No fails - runs 24/7 last boot several months ago when I upgraded the HDD's from 4 X 2 TB to 4 X 4 TB.

If you ever decide to use LINUX say for a NAS server it's simple - built in kernel facility mdadm and HDD's can be all sorts of DIFFERENT sizes too --even for RAID 0 and RAID 10 - but that's another issue !!!!.

Cheers
jimbo

I'm actually using storage spaces now but as I understand it, in a two-way mirror I can only lose one drive. In a three-way mirror I can only lose two drives. I have lost two drives in the 2 years that I have had (4) 6TB WD red drives on my two-way mirror in storage spaces. So part of this is going with Enterprise HGST SAS drives because they have a super low failure rate.

In RAID 10, I can lose half my drives granted I got really lucky and lost the right ones - and then plus there is a speed benefit that I really want to take advantage of.

But I would be using disk manager and not storage spaces. btw the article you linked very briefly talks about creating a RAID in storage spaces which does not do RAID 10. And it has a screen shot of disk manager and not storage spaces. I do not think you really read my post and you just wanted to mention you have a raid 0 with embedded raid 0. Which is cool. and I would do that with a system drive, just not my storage RAID.

My question is, can i add drives later to RAID 10 in disk manager and re-balance the RAID as you can re-balance, or 'optimize' in storage spaces?

Found the answer in case anyone is wondering. Storage Spaces treats each mirror like a single drive. That's why you can only have a single drive fail in a two way mirror even if you have 4,6, or 8 disks.

This makes sense when you consider that you can plug anything in and storage spaces can use it no matter the drive size; any external USB drive - AND it does not lower the capacity of all other drives to equal that of the lowest common denominator. Very convenient and easy to use. Very consumer grade though.