Bug with defragmentation of Storage Spaces mirrored volume with ReFS; pool consumes all free space

Question

Following up from this unanswered question in the archive (because the bug still exists); https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/de22e680-5202-4193-b13a-81f3e39058a0/storage-spaces-pool-does-not-reclaim-free-space-from-deleted-files?forum=win10itprogeneral

I can confirm this frustrating bug still exists and this issue needs more visibility. On build 2004 I can create a simple two way mirror of identical SATA disks and format with ReFS using the storage spaces control panel applet (so all default settings). When using the "optimize drives" function (aka the disk defragmenter and NOT the "optimize drive usage" function within storage spaces applet), the pool itself then proceeds to eat up free space while the mirrored volume is slowly being "trimmed" during the defragment operation until it is almost entirely full after the defrag completes. This test is done without actually having ANY real data on the volume. My only workaround at the moment is to disable the weekly defrag on a ReFS volume in a storage spaces pool until this issue is fixed.

Outside of the Storage Spaces applet, the volume appears to be operating nominally and disk management gives accurate true free space count - however I have seen a few instances where the volume is set to read-only in what seems to be an automated defense mechanism by storage spaces when it thinks the pool is almost full.

Does MS have any more follow up on the progress of fixing this bug?

Answer 1

Hey I finally switched to a Synology after having issues with storage spaces.

Answer 2

Hi,

Below is an article about Windows 2004 known issue and workaround, since the article mentions the "defrag" with powershell, you may check if you could find any useful information.

https://internal.support.services.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4570719/workaround-and-recovery-steps-for-issue-with-some-parity-storage-space

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If this issue is urgent, I would also suggest you contact Microsoft Customer Support and Services where more in-depth investigation can be done so that you would get a more satisfying explanation and solution to this issue.

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If the reply could be of help, please help to accept it as an answer, thanks for your cooperation!
Thanks for your time!
Best Regards,
Anne

Answer 3

Hello, after just googling the KB number 4570719 and "workaround" I found easily accessible public facing pages without requiring a login privilege that I apparently don't have with my personal account here.

The issue described in this workaround is not the same issue as I have described above. Instead, it references a fix to data corruption on parity drives that upgraded to Windows 2004. The article also mentions that this issue has been fixed in KB4568831. This is not in any way related to my bug here.

Furthermore, following the steps of the workaround will cause the issue I have detailed here; it invokes the defrag operation that will cause the storage pool to report all free space depleted.

Answer 4

Struggling with the exact same issue - my entire storage spaces capacity has been consumed despite having significantly less data than the storage spaces total capacity.

No matter what I have tried, it will not shrink the capacity - only a migration of data out of the ReFS volume to NTFS seems to be the workaround.

Frustratingly, this issue was fixed in an Insider build back in early July but has regressed in the latest Insider 20201 release.

Answer 5

Will this issue with not freeing up space be solved in the upcoming 20H2 release?

And will there be ReFs dual parity be added when I install atleast 7 drives in future updates?
I am running storage spaces 'cause i want redundancy and I don't want to have another system to backup my 40+TB Data of important 4k Videos.