Hi,

In this case, the storage pool has a dual parity configured which requires 7 physical disks as minimum to operate. I have 7 physical disks in the storage space so if I remove one, the dual parity virtual disk will not be able to operate at the required redundancy level as it requires 7 physical disks. To get around this, I first need to add another physical disk to the system. When removing physical disks from the system you need to consider if, once the physical disk is removed, will there still be enough physical disks in the system with free space available to ensure the required redundancy level is maintained. If this is not the case, the operation will fail.

As your issue, 30tb disk will be required to repair your storage space. 

Hi Kate

Thank you for your response. Just to clarify, I have to add a further 30tb to repair, this is on top of the 18tb I already added or total? It does seem a little excessive for a pool of 9tb, 8 drives in total and only 1 failed drive.

Here is the actual POOL which consists of 8 drives and contains about 9tb of data.

FriendlyName           ResiliencySettingName  OperationalStatus     HealthStatus          IsManualAttach                         Size
------------           ---------------------  -----------------     ------------          --------------                         ----
Data                   Parity                 Detached              Unhealthy             False                               9.69 TB

FriendlyName           CanPool                OperationalStatus     HealthStatus          Usage                                  Size
------------           -------                -----------------     ------------          -----                                  ----
PhysicalDisk7          True                   OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
PhysicalDisk8          False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                       465.76 GB
ATA WDC WD20EARS-00... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ST2000DM001-1ER164 ... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ATA WDC WD20EARS-00... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ATA WDC WD20EARS-00... False                  Lost Communication    Warning               Retired                             1.82 TB
ATA WDC WD20EARX-00... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ATA WDC WD20EARS-00... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ATA WDC WD20EARS-00... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ATA WDC WD20EARS-00... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB

I ended up adding a further 9 2tb drive to this and it still would not respond to repair, it just exits immediately which is a common problem I have found during research. I was easily able to remove the drives I added to assist repair of the pool using the graphical interface to get the above.

Thanks again for responding.

Kind regards

Mark

Hi all

I'm running windows 8.1 and have a set of 8 2tb drives setup in parity. This setup has worked flawlessly for the past 12 months until a drive died. I added a new one into the pool and tried to remove the expired drive but Storage Spaces keeps saying add more drives. The pool has about 9tb of data in it and was around 60% full. I had some drives spare and a SAS controller so I have now added another 8 2tb drives (total now 16) but I'm still unable to bring the pool online despite having over 30tb of actual space for it to do repairs it insists I add more drives, I have no more ports and no more drives. If I run repair in powershell (admin) it exits immediately with no error but doesn't solve the problem. I've done some inquiries on the pool, listed below, I just hope someone can help as I've scoured the net trying everything I could find but nothing seems to get me out of the problem. 

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-VirtualDisk

FriendlyName           ResiliencySettingName  OperationalStatus     HealthStatus          IsManualAttach                         Size
------------           ---------------------  -----------------     ------------          --------------                         ----
Data                   Parity                 Detached              Unhealthy             False                               9.69 TB

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> get-physicaldisk

FriendlyName           CanPool                OperationalStatus     HealthStatus          Usage                                  Size
------------           -------                -----------------     ------------          -----                                  ----
ATA WDC WD20EARX-00... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ATA ST32000542AS SC... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ATA WDC WD20EARS-00... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ST2000DM001-1ER164 ... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ATA WDC WD20EARS-00... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
Drive 5                False                  Lost Communication    Warning               Retired                             1.82 TB
ATA WDC WD20EARX-00... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ATA WDC WD20EARS-00... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ATA WDC WD20EARS-00... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ATA WDC WD20EARS-00... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ATA ST2000DM001-1CH... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ATA WDC WD20EZRX-00... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ATA ST2000DL003-9VT... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ATA ST2000DM001-1CH... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
ATA ST2000DM001-1E6... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
PhysicalDisk9          False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                       465.76 GB
ATA ST32000542AS SC... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB
Hitachi HDS5C3020AL... False                  OK                    Healthy               Auto-Select                         1.82 TB

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-StoragePool

FriendlyName               OperationalStatus          HealthStatus               IsPrimordial               IsReadOnly               
------------               -----------------          ------------               ------------               ----------               
Primordial                 OK                         Healthy                    True                       False                    
Volume0                    Degraded                   Warning                    False                      False      

Hi again Kate

As per my second post, I am not getting anywhere with this problem. I'm confident the data is intact but I just can't get enough drives to help it repair.

I've done some more research but I just don't see a way around this issue. 

Can anyone help?