I have been adding hard drives as I run out of space in my plex server for a few years, and I now have three hard drives of varying sizes up to 14TB. I think I should start to get a little more serious about my data, and I’m looking at moving everything into an refs storage space with a parity drive for better resiliency. Having everything in one neat virtual disk also sounds more convenient too. I currently use an old workstation PC with limited hardware specs, and will eventually upgrade to a whole new motherboard and CPU to serve as my plex server, but as funds are limited I’m trying to get the most life out of this setup as I can.
Keeping that eventual upgrade in mind, how difficult is it to transfer a storage space pool from one install of windows to another? Can I just plug all the drives belonging to the storage space pool into the sata ports on my next motherboard, and install windows? Does it take special setup, or specific hardware requirements? I’ve never used RAID or windows’ storage space features before. Can this even be done, or do you just have to reformat the pool and copy the data from a backup? If it can be done, can I jump from win10 to win11 with my storage space pool?
Not sure how much the current hardware specs matter for this question. Just in case though…The current PC is a Dell optiplex 790 with an i7 2600 and 16 gigs DDR3. The motherboard only has four sata II ports, and they’re all used. One might actually be a sata III though if I remember correctly I have my boot SSD on that port. I hope to find a deal eventually on something with a higher core count, and a lot of sata ports.
Thanks for the help! Looking forward to learning from you all.
MS Storage Space is cool and fun but really it’s safer to build a TrueNAS server for your important files.
I suggest you do both.
You can make a modest TrueNAS server with 16GB RAM and an old i5 CPU.
Creating ReFS volumes was removed from Windows 10.
It’s already been previously mentioned, is to try something like TrueNAS. However, since TrueNAS only supports ZFS, you’d need to find a way to transfer your media.
Unless you buy 10/11 Pro for Workstations.
I’ve got some experience with Storage Spaces for 10/11. To answer your question of will it pick it up if you move the drives the a different computer or need to re-install windows, the answer is yes (probably, like 95% sure). You might need to go into disk management to “online” the drives, but once they’re all there it should just work. If you use bitlocker, the process becomes a little more complicated, but unencrypted it should just work.
Something to know about ReFS, it does not checksum file data right out of the box, only metadata is checksummed by default. If you care about preventing bit-rot, you’ll want to enable this. Ask google, it’s not too hard, but you need to enable it before you write data to the ReFS volume because it will only checksum new data after you enable it.
Also by default, ReFS will only do a data scrub of the drives if it detects some kind of issue. You’ll need to configure a task to do periodic data scrubs to catch and correct bit-rot or drive issues.
Lastly, Windows does not do a great job of letting you know if there’s an issue. So you’ll need to figure something out to look out for issues with the drives themselves.
Personally, I find nothing wrong with ReFS and Storage Spaces, but it’s really a solution I’d only recommend if need to keep everything in one computer and the computer needs to be windows. I call this the “one box to rule them all” strategy. If you already have this stuff on a separate computer, TrueNAS is a little more robust.
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