Storage Spaces can't remove disk

Question

W10. Storage pool composed of four drives. I had two drives get degraded, in my storage pool, and had to replace them.

The dead drives are now marked as "retired" , and has been physically removed, but I can't actually remove them from the Storage Spaces. It throws an error saying that it can't finish removing files from the drives, and to add an additional hard disk.

I found guides saying that I need to run a repair-virtualdisk. I've since run a chkdsk, repair-virtualdisk, an optimization, rebooted, and I STILL cannot get these disks to allow me to remove them. What's the issue, here? How do I forcibly remove these non-existent drives from the cluster?

PS C:\Users\username> get-storagejob

Name IsBackgroundTask ElapsedTime JobState PercentComplete BytesProcessed BytesTotal

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Helium Pool-Repair True 00:07:11 Suspended 0 0 B 1 GB

PS C:\Users\username> get-physicaldisk

Number FriendlyName SerialNumber MediaType CanPool OperationalStatus HealthStatus Usage Size

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3 ATA ST12000NT001-3LX SCSI Disk Device 0007 HDD False OK Healthy Auto-Select 10.91 TB

   ATA HGST HUH728080AL SCSI Disk Device 0005                                 HDD       False   Lost Communication Warning      Retired       	7.28 TB
```1      ATA HGST HUH728080AL SCSI Disk Device 0004                                 HDD       False   OK                 Healthy      Auto-Select   	7.28 TB

2      ATA ST12000NT001-3LX SCSI Disk Device 0003                                 HDD       False   OK                 Healthy      Auto-Select  	10.91 TB

```sql
   ATA HGST HUH728080AL SCSI Disk Device 0002                                 HDD       False   Lost Communication Warning      Retired       	7.28 TB
```0      ATA HGST HUH728080AL SCSI Disk Device 0001                                 HDD       False   OK                 Healthy      Auto-Select   	7.28 TB

Answer 1

Hi Matt R,

Please see if the following commands can remove the retired disks from the storage space pool.

$disks = Get-PhysicalDisk -Usage Retired
Remove-PhysicalDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName "Storage Spaces" -PhysicalDisks $disks

Best Regards,

Ian Xue

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If the Answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it.

Answer 2

I wound up having to destroy the entire storage pool to fix the problem. Thanks to a mistake on my part, when copying data off the pool, I've now lost a LOT of data. I'm going to move away from storage spaces entirely, as a result of this.

This product is absolutely not a functional one, and I'll be pushing to make sure it isn't utilized anywhere I work, now or in the future.

Answer 3

The solution to this was to delete the pool, and recreate it. Thanks to a mistake when migrating data to a different location, I've now lost an unknown amount of data. I'm going to look for a different solution, and move away from storage spaces. They've now shown themselves to be unreliable and worthless.