I have a pool of 3x500GB where one the physical drives is having intermittent issues. Currently, there is only one parity Virtual Disk of 300GB Fixed across 3 columns. I want to replace the bad drive with a good one. The old way (pre-2012) was replace the disk, repair the RAID 5, resync and done. These basic steps are not working. So far I have added a 4th 500GB drive to the pool. After searching and failing to find a way to move the data non-destructively, I decided to just pull the data cable on the disk I wanted to replace. After refresh/rescan, the disconnected drive shows "lost communication" and the virtual disk (after trying to repair) shows "unknown" (but the volume on that disk is accessible in Explorer). When I try to remove the physical disk in Server Manager, I get "The selected physical disk cannot be removed". Reading the error message, I see that the replacement disk cannot contain any part of a virtual disk. The replacement disk that I just added appears to have some space allocated (possibly because I have tried this same procedure a couple of times already?). When I look at the parity disk properties/health, it shows all four physical disks under "physical disks in use". I have deleted and recreated a lot of storage pools lately while trying to understand how they work but I would like to avoid that this time. The data on the virtual disk in question is highly deduplicated and it took quite a while to get it that way. Since I can't find a way to copy/mirror the disk while keeping it fully deduplicated, I would need 3x the space to copy it all off, or a lot of time to load up and deduplicate a new virtual disk. I have several questions: 1. How can a 3 column parity disk use parts of four physical disks? And can that be fixed without recreating the virtual disk? 2. When creating a virtual disk (for example a 3 column disk in a pool that has four or more physical drives), is there a way to specify which physical disks to use? 3. Can a virtual disk's allocation be moved from one physical disk to another without data loss? 4. Can a deduplicated virtual disk be moved/mirrored/backed up without expanding the data? Any help is appreciated.

Thank you for your response. But your answer has nothing to do with any of my questions. As I indicated, I want to avoid the simple answer of "copy all of the data to another disk, recreate the pool, and copy everything back". I am trying gather some information about how storage pools work in order to better troubleshoot this (and future) issues.

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Hi, In my tests, I created a parity virtual disk in a storage pool created by 3 iSCSI disks. Then I disconnected 1 disk like it is failed. After a refresh, the yellow triangle mark occurs, and the disconnected disk now displayed with SID instead of friendly name. Then I added another iSCSI disks into the storage pool and choose as Automatic. After that I could directly remove the disconnected disk by right click on the SID in Physical Disks box of Storage Pools page. Please see if you meet the requirement of this part: How do I replace a physical disk? http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/11382.storage-spaces-frequently-asked-questions-faq.aspx#How_do_I_replace_a_physical_disk And for your question 2, we could specify which physical disk to use, by using PowerShell command. See: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848643.aspxTechNet Subscriber Support in forum |If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tnmff@microsoft.com.

Please see if you meet the requirement of this part: How do I replace a physical disk? http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/11382.storage-spaces-frequently-asked-questions-faq.aspx#How_do_I_replace_a_physical_disk And for your question 2, we could specify which physical disk to use, by using PowerShell command. See: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848643.aspx The issue with removing the physical disk resolved itself and the virtual disk is now located on the correct three physical disks (the original two and the replacement). What appears to have happened is that the parity WAS regenerating to the replacement drive but I did not recognize that fact. The confusion was that the 3-column virtual disk showed four physical disks in use (the old bad disk, and the three good disks) while it was regenerating so I could not remove the bad drive from the pool. In the old Disk Manager, you could see "Resyncing % complete". Now you just see "In Service" during regeneration. Is there a PS command to see % complete when a virtual disk from a storage pool is resyncing/remirroring? Thanks for the answer to #2. All the physical disks are set to automatic usage. Is there a way to change them to manual without removing them from the pool?

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848651.aspx PS C:\> Set-PhysicalDisk -FriendlyName PhysicalDisk2 -Usage ManualSelect -possibe "usage" value: AutoSelect, HotSpare, Journal, ManualSelect To view resync status You could use Get-StoraheJob PS command, not sure about GUI possibility http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848659.aspx BTW: you have at least one more duplicate thread open maybe it would be worth to close some of them ;-)

Thanks for the info. I did re-post to File Services and Storage in hopes of getting better answers after the first couple of responses to this thread.