Change Storage Space in Storage Pool in Windows 10

thoatswold · 26 Jun 2020

Well, as I said before: If I try to increase the size of the volume in Manage Storage Spaces, even by a very small amount, it fails with the error "Can't change the storage space: not enough available capacity".

Here's the screenshot of a failed attempt to increase the volume size from 1.75TB to 1.76TB:

Change Storage Space in Storage Pool in Windows 10-vera-screenshot-failed-increase-volume-size.png

In the previous screenshot, I notice that the first two physical disks are only being partially used, although the third disk is using 99.9%. I have no idea why. Presumably this must be related to the shortfall.

Brink · 26 Jun 2020

thoatswold said:

Well, as I said before: If I try to increase the size of the volume in Manage Storage Spaces, even by a very small amount, it fails with the error "Can't change the storage space: not enough available capacity".

Here's the screenshot of a failed attempt to increase the volume size from 1.75TB to 1.76TB:

In the previous screenshot, I notice that the first two physical disks are only being partially used, although the third disk is using 99.9%. I have no idea why. Presumably this must be related to the shortfall.

Your other screenshot shows your storage pool has a total capacity of 2.85 TB, but only using 1.75 TB by your "MyVolume (M:)" storage space.

Technically, you should had still been able to change this since your storage pool still has available space that can be allocated to the storage space.

If you have another drive to temporarily dump your files on as a backup, I'd say delete the current "MyVolume (M:)" storage space, and see if you are able to create a new one set to use all 2.85 TB storage pool capacity.

thoatswold · 28 Jun 2020

Thank you. Fortunately I am still at the experimental stage of setting this up, so I don't have any files on the volume to back up.

I decided to go back to square one. I removed the virtual disk and the storage pool, reinitialized the physical disks, and replaced one of the disks with a larger one so that the setup wasn't identical.

I then recreated the storage pool using the same PowerShell command as before (see earlier post). The size of the pool was now 3.98TB, very slightly smaller than the sum of the physical disk sizes. So far so good.

I created a new volume, again using the same command as before (with UseMaximumSize). This resulted in a volume/storage space of 2.72TB, about 70% of the available space in the pool. This is about the same proportion as last time, so it seems the behaviour is consistent, albeit consistently wrong!

I removed this volume, and followed your suggestion by creating another new volume, this time specifying the size manually to be very slightly less than the total pool size:

Code:

New-Volume -StoragePoolFriendlyName "MyStoragePool" -FriendlyName "MyVolume" -ResiliencySettingName "Simple" -FileSystem NTFS -AccessPath "M:" -ProvisioningType Fixed -Size 3.97TB

I was pleased to find that this worked and gave me a volume of the correct size, using almost all the space in the pool. Which is great, but it does seem that there is a bug with the -UseMaximumSize parameter in this context.

However, I have not tested whether I can actually copy 3.97TB of data to the volume. Perhaps I should do that, as in theory the storage space is supposed to be able to be larger than the storage pool.

Brink · 28 Jun 2020

thoatswold said:

Thank you. Fortunately I am still at the experimental stage of setting this up, so I don't have any files on the volume to back up.

I decided to go back to square one. I removed the virtual disk and the storage pool, reinitialized the physical disks, and replaced one of the disks with a larger one so that the setup wasn't identical.

I then recreated the storage pool using the same PowerShell command as before (see earlier post). The size of the pool was now 3.98TB, very slightly smaller than the sum of the physical disk sizes. So far so good.

I created a new volume, again using the same command as before (with UseMaximumSize). This resulted in a volume/storage space of 2.72TB, about 70% of the available space in the pool. This is about the same proportion as last time, so it seems the behaviour is consistent, albeit consistently wrong!

I removed this volume, and followed your suggestion by creating another new volume, this time specifying the size manually to be very slightly less than the total pool size:

Code:

New-Volume -StoragePoolFriendlyName "MyStoragePool" -FriendlyName "MyVolume" -ResiliencySettingName "Simple" -FileSystem NTFS -AccessPath "M:" -ProvisioningType Fixed -Size 3.97TB

I was pleased to find that this worked and gave me a volume of the correct size, using almost all the space in the pool. Which is great, but it does seem that there is a bug with the -UseMaximumSize parameter in this context.

However, I have not tested whether I can actually copy 3.97TB of data to the volume. Perhaps I should do that, as in theory the storage space is supposed to be able to be larger than the storage pool.

Great news so far.