Two-way Mirror Storage Issue?

Bloodaxes

Hi,

I have two hdd (1tb and 2tb) and I made them into one (not sure a good/bad idea) one being quite old (1tb) and the other fairly recent (2tb). Recently I've been having a weird "problem" that mainly affected me a couple days ago. When the demo of resident evil 3 released on steam I kept getting a message saying insufficient space. This is odd as I have around 1.8tb empty space. I tried several solutions but nothing seemed to work. Now, I'm also getting a warning saying low capacity; add 1 drive.

Does anyone know what could be the issue?

Thanks

Quizzical

What do you mean you "made them into one"?  Is this JBOD?  RAID 1?  If it's RAID 1, then that's your problem.  In RAID 1, all data must be stored on both drives, so when one drive is full, that's it.  Normally, you wouldn't want to use any sort of RAID with dissimilar drives, though.

Bloodaxes

Quizzical said:

What do you mean you "made them into one"?  Is this JBOD?  RAID 1?  If it's RAID 1, then that's your problem.  In RAID 1, all data must be stored on both drives, so when one drive is full, that's it.  Normally, you wouldn't want to use any sort of RAID with dissimilar drives, though.

Yes, I think it's RAID 1. So my solutions are either:

a) Split the 2tb hdd in half and keep the RAID 1 as 1tb + 1tb with an extra 1 tb
b) Reformat the drives and split them instead of two-way mirror

Am I getting you right?

Thanks for the help

Ridelynn

Well, you don’t have mirrored storage, nor striped parity storage. 

Sounds like you set them up as either a JBOD or LVM.

Mirrored and striped can only be as large as your smallest drive, and striped with parity redundant protection requires at least three drives to have protection.

You will have to go over your configuration for those drives and double check it.

another thing to check are Symlinks. I had a similar issue on my wife’s computer - her spinner was showing 1.2T free, but the directory she was trying to install to was actually a symlink to her SSD, which had filled up.

Bloodaxes

Ridelynn said:

Well, you don’t have mirrored storage, nor striped parity storage. 

Sounds like you set them up as either a JBOD or LVM.

Mirrored and striped can only be as large as your smallest drive, and striped with parity redundant protection requires at least three drives to have protection.

You will have to go over your configuration for those drives and double check it.

another thing to check are Symlinks. I had a similar issue on my wife’s computer - her spinner was showing 1.2T free, but the directory she was trying to install to was actually a symlink to her SSD, which had filled up.

That's what is showing me. 

The bigger hdd is not working well with the smaller one as one can hold more than the other. Files being shared evenly is what's causing the warning.

Quizzical

Bloodaxes said:

Quizzical said:

What do you mean you "made them into one"?  Is this JBOD?  RAID 1?  If it's RAID 1, then that's your problem.  In RAID 1, all data must be stored on both drives, so when one drive is full, that's it.  Normally, you wouldn't want to use any sort of RAID with dissimilar drives, though.

Yes, I think it's RAID 1. So my solutions are either:

a) Split the 2tb hdd in half and keep the RAID 1 as 1tb + 1tb with an extra 1 tb
b) Reformat the drives and split them instead of two-way mirror

Am I getting you right?

Thanks for the help

I wouldn't really recommend using RAID for a consumer system.  I'd just use the 2 TB drive as a normal drive, and back up whatever you think it relatively important on the 1 TB drive.  Depending on what your data looks like, it may make more sense to just get an SSD and install most of what you have there.

RAID 1 is intended more for situations where you really want to avoid downtime.  If you have a workstation with two drives in RAID 1 and one of them completely dies, you can just keep working.  Then your local IT person can fix it when he gets around to it--and maybe even after you've left for the day or before you come in in the morning.

For consumer use, you probably are your own repair person, and keeping the computer running isn't as urgent.  In most cases, what you really want is to not lose your data.  Daily incremental backups will work well enough for that, and they're much simpler to set up and use than a RAID array.

Bloodaxes

Quizzical said:

Bloodaxes said:

Quizzical said:

What do you mean you "made them into one"?  Is this JBOD?  RAID 1?  If it's RAID 1, then that's your problem.  In RAID 1, all data must be stored on both drives, so when one drive is full, that's it.  Normally, you wouldn't want to use any sort of RAID with dissimilar drives, though.

Yes, I think it's RAID 1. So my solutions are either:

a) Split the 2tb hdd in half and keep the RAID 1 as 1tb + 1tb with an extra 1 tb
b) Reformat the drives and split them instead of two-way mirror

Am I getting you right?

Thanks for the help

I wouldn't really recommend using RAID for a consumer system.  I'd just use the 2 TB drive as a normal drive, and back up whatever you think it relatively important on the 1 TB drive.  Depending on what your data looks like, it may make more sense to just get an SSD and install most of what you have there.

RAID 1 is intended more for situations where you really want to avoid downtime.  If you have a workstation with two drives in RAID 1 and one of them completely dies, you can just keep working.  Then your local IT person can fix it when he gets around to it--and maybe even after you've left for the day or before you come in in the morning.

For consumer use, you probably are your own repair person, and keeping the computer running isn't as urgent.  In most cases, what you really want is to not lose your data.  Daily incremental backups will work well enough for that, and they're much simpler to set up and use than a RAID array.

The only reason I went for that is because the 1tb hdd is quite old. I was worried it might fail sometimes and would lose all data so I made it a RAID with the newer one. I do have an SSD but it's small (256 gb) used exclusively for the operating system and certain software I use. Someday I'll do upgrade to an ssd but the bigger ones are still a little expensive compared to a normal hdd.

So, in a nutshell, the only way to "fix" this is by formatting am I getting it right? Or my solution of splitting the 2tb in two 1tb mitigate the solution? As I don't really feel like going through a format and having to reinstall everything from scratch. Even with what's happening right now, I don't really want to go through that hassle xD

Iselin

Bloodaxes said:

Ridelynn said:

Well, you don’t have mirrored storage, nor striped parity storage. 

Sounds like you set them up as either a JBOD or LVM.

Mirrored and striped can only be as large as your smallest drive, and striped with parity redundant protection requires at least three drives to have protection.

You will have to go over your configuration for those drives and double check it.

another thing to check are Symlinks. I had a similar issue on my wife’s computer - her spinner was showing 1.2T free, but the directory she was trying to install to was actually a symlink to her SSD, which had filled up.

That's what is showing me.

Yes. You've crippled your total storage down to 2TB (or only one with a 1:1 back up if it's RAID 1) by using 2 drives of unequal size. Like Quiz said the RAID arrangement will only use 1TB of your 2TB drive.

It gets worse. If you want to undo what you did there may be tools that preserve your data if you get rid of the Raid and go back to 2 separate drives but I'm not aware of any. Mind you, it's been years since I messed around with RAID - back in the days before SSDs when I was a fan for a while of Raid 2 for extra access speed - real or imagined, I never did settle that question to my own satisfaction

At least it's not your C: drive so no need to reinstall the OS.

Bloodaxes

What would you consider be my best course of action?

I'm kinda stumped at the moment, and can't add new games without removing existing ones.

Thanks

Quizzical

Bloodaxes said:

Quizzical said:

Bloodaxes said:

Quizzical said:

What do you mean you "made them into one"?  Is this JBOD?  RAID 1?  If it's RAID 1, then that's your problem.  In RAID 1, all data must be stored on both drives, so when one drive is full, that's it.  Normally, you wouldn't want to use any sort of RAID with dissimilar drives, though.

Yes, I think it's RAID 1. So my solutions are either:

a) Split the 2tb hdd in half and keep the RAID 1 as 1tb + 1tb with an extra 1 tb
b) Reformat the drives and split them instead of two-way mirror

Am I getting you right?

Thanks for the help

I wouldn't really recommend using RAID for a consumer system.  I'd just use the 2 TB drive as a normal drive, and back up whatever you think it relatively important on the 1 TB drive.  Depending on what your data looks like, it may make more sense to just get an SSD and install most of what you have there.

RAID 1 is intended more for situations where you really want to avoid downtime.  If you have a workstation with two drives in RAID 1 and one of them completely dies, you can just keep working.  Then your local IT person can fix it when he gets around to it--and maybe even after you've left for the day or before you come in in the morning.

For consumer use, you probably are your own repair person, and keeping the computer running isn't as urgent.  In most cases, what you really want is to not lose your data.  Daily incremental backups will work well enough for that, and they're much simpler to set up and use than a RAID array.

The only reason I went for that is because the 1tb hdd is quite old. I was worried it might fail sometimes and would lose all data so I made it a RAID with the newer one. I do have an SSD but it's small (256 gb) used exclusively for the operating system and certain software I use. Someday I'll do upgrade to an ssd but the bigger ones are still a little expensive compared to a normal hdd.

So, in a nutshell, the only way to "fix" this is by formatting am I getting it right? Or my solution of splitting the 2tb in two 1tb mitigate the solution? As I don't really feel like going through a format and having to reinstall everything from scratch. Even with what's happening right now, I don't really want to go through that hassle xD

If the fundamental problem here is that things are going wrong because you've made your hard drive setup too complicated, then making it even more complicated doesn't seem like a good solution.  I'd try to figure out if you can break up your RAID array without losing your data.

Using a drive for incremental backup is probably a far better solution.  Most of that 1 TB of data is probably just stuff that you downloaded from somewhere and could download again if you needed to.  That doesn't really need to be backed up, or at least, not by you.  What you really want to back up is the fraction of your data that was generated by you and is irreplaceable.

You can use the Windows backup tool to tell it to back up all files in whichever particular directories you tell it.  What it will then do is to save a new copy of those files each day, but only if the file has changed.  This generally doesn't take much space, which allows it to maintain backups of every version of a file you've had going back years.  If you overwrite or delete a file and then realize six months later that you need it, it will still be sitting there, though it can take some time to find it.  With RAID 1, if you mess up your one latest copy, it's gone.

Normally, if you're going to use any sort of RAID, you want all of the drives involved to be identical.  Not just the same capacity, but exactly the same SKU.  Otherwise, because some drives are faster than others, some drives will have to slow down so that others can keep up.

Iselin

Bloodaxes said:

What would you consider be my best course of action?

I'm kinda stumped at the moment, and can't add new games without removing existing ones.

Thanks

The only way I know of absent any new 3rd party tools I'm not aware of, would be to copy the data to another drive - an external drive would do the trick, get rid of the raid and make the drives separate which will involve a reformat as well, and then copy the data back from the external HD to your new D volume.

Hopefully all the Register dependencies would still work and point to the "new" D drive. Not 100% sure about that but even if you need re-installs, most game installation programs, especially Steam installers, will look first before reinstalling the whole thing and just adjust whatever pointers it needs to adjust to get the game back in working order if it sees that the files are already in the drive.

Vrika

Bloodaxes said:

Ridelynn said:

Well, you don’t have mirrored storage, nor striped parity storage. 

Sounds like you set them up as either a JBOD or LVM.

Mirrored and striped can only be as large as your smallest drive, and striped with parity redundant protection requires at least three drives to have protection.

You will have to go over your configuration for those drives and double check it.

another thing to check are Symlinks. I had a similar issue on my wife’s computer - her spinner was showing 1.2T free, but the directory she was trying to install to was actually a symlink to her SSD, which had filled up.

That's what is showing me. 

The bigger hdd is not working well with the smaller one as one can hold more than the other. Files being shared evenly is what's causing the warning.

Could you post a screenshot where that "Physical drives" is expanded?

Bloodaxes

Here:

Vrika

Bloodaxes said:

Here:

Ok.

Windows 10 allows you to create Storage Spaces where multiple physical disks are combined into a virtual Storage Space.

It looks like you have create a Storage Space this way, and set its capacity to 2.71 TB? It's also set to have Two-way mirror back-up system, which means it will store 2 copies of all data to separate hard disks for data safety?

For Two-way mirror system with 2 physical hard disks, the maximum capacity they can support is equal to capacity of smallest of those hard disks (after smaller disk fills up the system can't mirror the data to two separate disks any more). For you this means that you should have set that Storage Space size to be equal to SAMSUNG HD103UJ capacity 931 GB.

Windows 10 allows you to set Storage Space capacity larger than your physical hardware can support, and once your physical hardware starts to fill up it complains about low capacity and asks you to add more disk drives. That's why it allowed you to set up Storage Space size of 2.71 TB with that configuration, even though your physical hardware could not support the whole capacity.

It means that everything is working correctly, but as long as your Storage Space is set up that way with those hard disks you're limited to 931 GB.

To use the 2.71 TB hard disk capacity that you have, you'd have to delete that storage space, and then either use those hard disks as normal separate hard disks, or alternatively create a storage space that does not have Two-way mirror backup. If you had selected "Simple" resiliency type while creating it (which means no backup), only then could those hard disks be combined into a single 2.71 TB storage space.

I think Windows 10 does not allow you to delete storage spaces without losing all the data. I don't know if there would be any third party program that would allow you to delete/reconfigure that storage space while keeping the data.

Bloodaxes

So i'm screwed either way haha. Guess when I get a chance I'll format and separate them.

Thanks ppl