I set up a "home server" running Windows 8.1. My main storage was a Storage Spaces Pool that contained 8 hard drives running under a parity scheme. I use this to archive movies, music and television programs from my Windows Media Center system in another room of the house. When I originally set up the pool, I told Storage Spaces that my pool was 50 TB even though it was not even close to that amount. Not sure why I did that but the problem it caused was that Windows always tells me how much room I have left of the 50 TB instead of how much room I really have left.
So to fix things, after 12 months of successfully using Storage Spaces, I decided to save up all of my data to external backups and re-create my Storage Spaces pool from scratch using the actual amount of available space as the stated size of my pool. Had a few problems deleting the original pool; system kept telling me that the pool was still in use when I was very sure it was not. Finally, I was successful in deleting the pool.
When I went to re-create my pool with three additional new hard drives in addition to the eight original drives from the deleted pool, Storage Spaces refuses to allow me to incorporate the previously used drives into my newly created pool, even though the old pool has been deleted. An error message stating that the old drives are still in use prevents me from incorporating them into my newly created pool. These eight old drives can be formatted and used successfully as regular data drives without problem but Windows 8.1 Storage Spaces will not accept the previously used drives into my new pool, even though they are completely empty and have been re-initialized and totally cleared of all partitions and data.
Approximately eight calls and six hours on the telephone with at least a dozen technicians and supervisors at Microsoft Answer Desk finally resulted in them telling me that Storage Spaces is only supported by the Pro support department for business users with at least 10 devices. I have scoured the Internet and tried many methods to "clear" these old drives unsuccessfully. Before giving up on the parity savings of Storage Spaces, I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on how to get my installation of Windows 8.1 to "release" these old drives so that they can be incorporated into a new Storage Spaces Pool. I have tried re-installing Windows 8.1 on my server machine, hoping that any registry record of "used" drives would be removed. It did not work. I was hoping someone might know a solution to this problem OR be able to refer me to a professional I could hire to help me with this problem.