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Storage Spaces Scan


Benplace

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I am having a strange issue.  My Storage Spaces volume went offline and will now only come online in read-only mode.

I ran a scan on the volume and it said there were unreadable sectors. (See attachment) So I went through a week long task of removing a drive from the pool, running a surface scan and adding it back on all 8 drives.  All 8 drives came back clean.  But afterwards I again ran a scan and the storage spaces has unreadable sectors.

What could cause a storage spaces volume to have unreadable sectors when all of the individual drives ran a good surface scan?

image.thumb.png.3ad170e663688f2fa2c9d3e20023aac6.png

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I am only in my Scanner trial period, but I thought Scanner was for individual HDDs only - not the entire DrivePool. When I run scanner, it loads each and every drive in my pool, but it does not load the DrivePool itself.

I am guessing that Scanner, in your example, sees the 146TB DrivePool, but of course cannot read the S.M.A.R.T. data because there is none on the DrivePool itself. The S.M.A.R.T. data resides on each individual HDD. Might this be causing your problem?

BTW, how did you get Scanner to see your DrivePool volume? I don't even see that option when I run Scanner. It loads all my individual HDDs, which is what I expected. But I guess it's not too important because Scanner does not seem to like scanning your DrivePool volume.

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9 hours ago, Benplace said:

It is not seeing a Stablebit Drivepool, it is seeing my Storage Spaces Volume.

 

I see. Because we are in a DrivePool forum, I immediately read into your info that it was a DrivePool volume that was named Storage Spaces.

I ran MS Storage Spaces for about ~7 years on my server before I hit my third major data loss after a single HDD failure in a ~30 HDD pool of drive somewhere about 120TB. I had Parity and Duplication on different MS Storage Spaces volumes, but a single HDD failure wiped out lots of my data and I was not able to recover from it. At the end of my experience with MS Storage Spaces, I was spending most of my time working in Powershell trying to get my system back up and running.

I finally gave up using MS Storage Spaces and bought a license for DrivePool, and have never looked back. I have had a few HDDs fail, over time, but in most cases I have been able to transfer the data off the failing HDD before complete failure. In any case, if a HDD fails in DrivePool, you only lose the data on that one failed HDD, not the entire pool as in the MS Storage Spaces volumes.

More to your point, I am not sure that StableBit Scanner is the program you need to monitor your individual HDDs in the MS Storage Spaces volume. Since Scanner picked up the entire MS Storage Spaces as a single volume, it is not able to see the individual HDDs in the pool and I cannot imagine it would not be able to read the S.M.A.R.T. data on each drive that it uses to monitor their status. In fact, from the picture you posted, Scanner is already warning you what it cannot do.

How long have you been using Scanner on your MS Storage Space volumes? And, has it been working in the past to scan and report problems for you?

From what I remember using MS Storage Spaces, none of my programs were able to see the individual HDDs in the MS Storage Spaces pool of drives. MS locks out any prying eyes from seeing what any individual drive is doing.

You might want to download the free version of HD Sentinel and see if that program is able to look into the individual HDDs in your MS Storage Spaces pool. I find HD Sentinel has some advantages over StableBit Scanner, and Scanner has other advantages over HD Sentinel. The free version of HD Sentinel usually lets you test drives to determine their health, but if you want to perform any fixes, then you need to purchase a license. I bought a license for HD Sentinel and have "repaired" a few drives, restoring them to health, and have used those drives for another year or so.

Anyway, HD Sentinel is free to download and maybe that would be able to check your MS Storage Spaces volume for bad sectors. If not, you have not invested any money into it.

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On 11/4/2022 at 10:16 AM, Benplace said:

I am having a strange issue.  My Storage Spaces volume went offline and will now only come online in read-only mode.

I ran a scan on the volume and it said there were unreadable sectors.

FWIW, I had similar problems when I was running MS Storage Spaces. The only way I was able to recover from that read-only mode issue was to create a new volume, transfer all the data to that new volume, delete the old volume. If MS Storage Spaces is telling you which drive is causing the problem, then I would remove that drive from the pool, low level format the HDD in a different computer, and if it cleared up the bad sectors warning, then I would put it back into the MS Storage Spaces pool.

I remember a couple of times that I was able to transfer all my files, except maybe 2 or 3 corrupt files, and that was what causing all the problems and putting my MS Storage Spaces volume into read-only mode. Because MS Storage Spaces uses a stripping method, a bad sector on drive can affect the entire volume. DrivePool is much better, IMHO, in handling errors like that. A corrupt file on a HDD in DrivePool only affects that specific file on that specific HDD. Makes data recovery in DrivePool much easier.

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Thanks, I already took one drive out of the storage space pool and copied all data to it. (It was a new set up so luckily I could fit it all on one drive)

I then blew away storage spaces and switched to Drive Pool.

The only issue with DrivePool is how much disk space it takes to duplicate files.  You basically lose half of your storage.

So if you have eight 10tb drives protected with Storage Spaces, RAID 5 gives you 70tb of useble space vs DrivePool with duplication gives you 40tb of useable space.  That extra 30tb is a lot to lose.

 

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