Appreciate the tutorial on the subject! Quick what if for you -- If a drive was used at some point as part of a Storage Space pool [but was not 'removed' using the tutorial process you outline] how can I go about getting the drive in a 'normal' state so it can be reused? Appears from the tinkering I've done, that it's not that straightforward but I could be easily missing something! Thanks...

The drive does not appear in Diskpart [attached via USB] but all indications are that a 'normal' drive similarly connected via USB would be shown. Same with looking in Windows Disk Management, the drive does not appear. Since the drive was part of a virtual disk and never 'Removed' properly I think the drive may never [or not without some effort which is beyond me] be made 'whole' and independent... If this all turns out to be the case it can be a cautionary tale and emphasizes the importance of your tutorial!!! You can potentially end up in a similar situation if there is a system/drive failure and you end up with only one disk in your hand out of a two-drive mirror. You can retrieve your data, but the drive might be 'bricked' from using 'normally' in a Windows environment. You can still read/write to this 'orphaned' Storage Spaces drive, but I expect other functionality will be lost. You've got me curious and I might do some trials as I'm presently in the earlier stages of two system builds and have the hw/sw resources to fairly easily 'test'. Will let you know if anything useful applies...

Sadly, I didn't copy my laptop system for a 'true' before/after test so the following may not be correct... So with that caveat, it appears that if you remove one of the drives being used in a Two-Drive Mirror Storage Pool and take it to different computer [in my case a laptop, connected by a 'USB to SATA' cable] you may be able to do the following to place the drive in a 'normal' configuration and reuse for other purposes. In my case it was a simple matter of going to Storage Spaces in the Control Panel on the laptop, confirming the Pool information showing the disks making up the pool, etc [One of them will be shown in an error status] and just deleting the Pool. Drive appeared in Disk Management [Not initialized, no Volume]. Sorry to be so 'wobbly' on this. Maybe someone else can give it a go...

Brink said:

That's encouraging news. Were you able to access the data on it?

In a word... No

Removing it from the Pool made the data inaccessible. I created a thread about my 'testing' Here

friends I'm trying to resolve a severe bluescreen issue that the folks at MS who are helping me are pretty sure Memory-related, but RAM is checking out perfect, and I want to disable/remove Storage spaces altogether. It is inplace to manage two 1tb drives in a mirror, one of the drives is failing and is offline. When I follow the directions here, after the Change Settings tick is activated, there is no remove option per drive. see image. I thought I would simply remove both drives.

a secondary issue is that I need to run something more detailed than chkdsk on all drives [boot ssd plus the two mentioned above]. I'm trying to use HDDSCAN, but it gives me apparently nothing but "Bad Blocks" on drives chkdsk says are fine. I suspect Storage Spaces may be ill advised in using the tool. another reason to just back it off
how?