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Is there a way to replace a disk in a storage space without partition on a W8.1 system?

I want to replace a 1.5TB drive with a 3TB drive but I don't have any spare sata ports. I do have enough space to move all the data on the 1.5TB drive to the other drives but I can't seem to find any option to "evict" all the data from the drive.

Moving ALL the data to an external harddrive is not an option because the pool is over 10TB and I would have to buy 10TB worth of harddrives to do so.

I know this would be easy if I had parity, but I don't.

EDIT: The data is pooled using Windows Storage Spaces (hence the tag). It's a "simple" storage space so no parity or resilience of any kind.

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  • How is the data pooled? RAID0? software/hardware RAID, lvm, or what? Is it windows,linux,mac or something else?
    – cybernard
    Commented Feb 3, 2014 at 0:54
  • Roughly how many TB of real data do you have?
    – cybernard
    Commented Feb 3, 2014 at 1:22

2 Answers 2

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How about a USB to SATA adapter?
An internal pci-e card with extra SATA ports?
SATA expander turn 1 port into 4 (down side =shared bandwidth)

Either of these work for you?

First, I don't know if you have a software, hardware, or how you have these drive pooled together. The controller might not like this idea, but it the only idea I have come up with so far.

Then cloning with a sector level copier. If you have a second spare PC around that would be handy. Turn everything off and don't turn it back on till the new drive is in place. Take the new drive and an old drive to spare PC. Get a bootable linux CD such as partedmagic. Then use dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512 conv=sync,noerror Where sda = 1.5tb and sdb =3tb hard drive. This will take hours. When it is done you should be able to attach the 3tb drive into the other hard drives connector.

If you weren't living on borrowed time, I would say back everything up to CrashPlan **an online, unlimited cloud storage provider. It is about $9.99 a month or less for multi-year plans.

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  • No, the goal is to be able to remove a harddrive. When I "started" the pool I didn't have enough drives for parity but now I have. If I could "evict" a drive and then remove it, I would be able to juggle the data around and eventually have an empty pool and full (single) drives. Then I would build a new pool with parity, add a drive and copy data to the pool one drive at a time. I'm sitting on a potential timebomb, if 1 drive fails, data from all the other drives could be corrupted
    – Tycho91
    Commented Feb 3, 2014 at 0:38
  • @Tycho91 added a new idea.
    – cybernard
    Commented Feb 3, 2014 at 0:51
  • I used Windows Storage spaces (dumb, I know). That could possibly work but doesn't solve the bigger picture. The data is actually scrambled across all the harddrive making it impossible to connect the harddrive to another pc and have the data on it make any sense. I'm not even sure if the pc will recognise the drive since it might be formatted in a special way
    – Tycho91
    Commented Feb 3, 2014 at 0:57
  • The second PC does not care if it can understand it or not. The dd software will make a sector for sector copy. It is like a copy machine, it see the data and copies it and it doesn't care what is on the page. The page could be in french,german,or russian but it can still copy it.
    – cybernard
    Commented Feb 3, 2014 at 1:04
  • Since we are dealing with Windows here my idea is risky. One thing I know would work, find a local retailer with 30 days return policy and no restocking fee and use the drives and return them. You should need them for less than a week.
    – cybernard
    Commented Feb 3, 2014 at 1:22
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I've searched for the answer of this problem but there isn't any straight forward solution for this. The accepted "work around" for this problem is:

1. Mark the drive you want to remove as retired:

Open a PowerShell and enter

Set-PhysicalDisk -FriendlyName "<the name of your disk>" -Usage Retired

For now there won't get any new data on this "retired" disk. If you want to see which virtualDisks are storring data on your "retired"-disk you can enter

Get-PhysicalDisk -FriendlyName "<the name of your disk>"  | Get-VirtualDisk

2. For every VirtualDisk which has no "simple" ressiliance-setting you can enter

Repair-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName "<name of the virtual disk with resilliance>"

This will kick in the "ressilliance-repairing" and move the data to other availabe disks

3. For every other virtual-disk:

Please end all processes and programms which are using this virtual disk.

a) Create a new virtual-disk.

If you have enought space it's adviced that you create a virtual-disk with ressilliance!

b) Copy the content from the old to the new one

c) Delete the old one

d) Adjust the drive-letter on the new virtual-disk

If you need temprary more space you can connect the new disk which replaces the old one through USB. After you are done you can install it properly in your system.

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