Win8 Storage Spaces/Pool: hard drive failure, recover data?

[vexingv]

I've been running a simple server as networked storage for keeping media (for XBMC and subsonic) as well as downloading new content (Sabnzbd and Sickbeard), and backup (FTP) using a Windows 8.1 system and its Storage Spaces feature to create a storage pool. This system had previously been a WHSv1 box that had been running pretty well but was getting a bit outdated so I really liked Windows 8's storage spaces feature.

My storage pool is a simple pool of 3x WD Green 2TB drives. There was no redundancy (my fault I know).

Earlier today, i believe my storage pool crashed. My server hung and took forever to boot. I retraced it to one of the drives in the storage pool as I physically disconnected it and the system was fine thereafter. However, I cannot see the storage pool at all.

Has anyone recovered data from a Storage Space/pool? What are my options?

As i figure out what i plan to do, suggestions on another server setup? I know about the linux distro's like FreeNAS, but I'm not familiar with Linux at all and thus reluctant to move away from windows. In a server, I essentially want all those apps mentioned above (Sabnzbd, Sickbeard, and Subsonic) to be able to be run and a large network storage repository.

Thanks.

 

[Batmeat]

Best to find a data recovery program. I really like GetDataBack for NTFS from Runtime Software. It's what I've used for last 5 years. make sure you have a backup copy of all your drives in the future.

Linux isn't that hard to learn and setup. I would do a Linux based NAS in the future. FreeNAS is good but I'd look at Turnkey linux distro .

 

[Cerb]

Linux isn't that hard to learn and setup. I would do a Linux based NAS in the future. FreeNAS is a good place to start.

Linux based is fine, but FreeNAS would not be the best place to start, since it's, well, not at all Linux based.

 

[Batmeat]

Linux based is fine, but FreeNAS would not be the best place to start, since it's, well, not at all Linux based.

Edited and changed....thnx for pointing that out. I meant that FreeNAS was good and left out a linux distro

 

[vexingv]

thanks for the tips. i'm looking to get R-studio for data recovery as there have been some posts regarding recovering data specifically from storage pools but i'll look into other software as well and other linux distros. but i think i may just settle on Win8, but simply use individual SMB/network shares instead of a pooled storage model. my 3TB WD Red drives just arrived today and i'm testing them first using WD diagnostics before i go further.

i also realized with the new version of Freenas (8+) that hardware requirements, specifically memory, is much higher due to the use of ZFS. such demanding requiriments can be tough for my server running older hardware and only 2GB DDR2.

 

[jolancer]

was hoping someone more inclined toward win8 and other garbage would of answered..

storage pool is microsofts proprietary filesystem format for software style raid. trying to recover data from it with one of the devices missing, i assume would be like trying to recover data from a corrupted fully encrypted drive. Doubt it would go anywhere.

I have absolutely zero will to try and find an answer to a problem from a piece of microsoft software that i can't even fathom why was created to begin with... I did however find the definition of the storage pool simply because it sounded completely useless and i wanted to see if i was missing something... and after skimming over the description (i bairly read so IDK why other ppl including yourself couldn't read its description) still offered no logical explination.

one might assume microsoft would have a piece of software that could read there proprietary garbage free from there site for customers who find them selfs in a predicament due to there useless software

 

[ViRGE]

As a long-time Storage Spaces user, as far as I know (and in this case I would halfway hope I'm wrong on this) there's no way to recover lost data from a simple space.

Simple storage spaces are striped, making them functionally equivalent to RAID-0. As a result virtually every file is going to be written across slabs on multiple disks. And since you don't have any kind of redundancy 1/3rd of every file is now gone.

Your options are the same as recovering from a RAID-0 failure: nothing. You don't have any whole files, so all of that data has been lost.🙁

As for what you should do with your next storage setup, that's going to be a question of what you're comfortable with and what you plan on doing. Since you're comfortable with Windows, I would argue that you should stick with Storage Spaces. As you've discovered a lack of redundancy is killer, but Storage Spaces is perfectly capable of handling failures if you use its redundancy modes. It was both two-way and three-way mirroring (RAID-1 style) and single redundancy parity spaces (RAID-5 style), either of which would have saved your data in this case.

I'm assuming here you're downloading things for long-time archival, so you'd be a good candidate for a parity space since that's the use case Microsoft has specifically designed it for. It has the lowest overhead (1 disk) of the redundant disk modes, and because it's spread out over multiple disks it has fast read speeds. Its drawbacks are that it really is best for archival as opposed to files you'll be rewriting constantly, it can only tolerate one disk failure (and doesn't have data scrubbing like mirrored spaces), and writing to a parity space can become slow as the drives fill up, particularly if it's thinly provisioned.

 

[milee]

@vexingv Your data isn't lost. What led you to conclude that the drive you pulled is damaged? Have you tried to connect/read that drive in another system? If the drive isn't the problem, try a new cable in the original system (after you make sure the drive gets detected in another system).

Don't do anything to any of the 3 drives!!

Your options are:

1. If there's a cable problem, change that one cable for the "faulty" drive.

2. If there's a motherboard/SATA port problem, connect the drive to a new port.

3. If you don't have any available SATA ports, attach the drive through a USB port with an adapter (Storage Spaces also works with USB attached drives).

4. Put all 3 drives in another system and boot. The new system should have Windows 8/2012 or 8.1/2012 R2 with the Storage Spaces components installed (in case of 8/8.1)

EDIT: In case you're attaching the drives to a new system with Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 and you still can't see the pool volume(s) mounted, you have to manually attach the pool VHDs in server manager or through Powershell.

 

[vexingv]

i realize the faults with lack of redundancy in my data storage model.

i narrowed this down to a hardware issue with one of the drives as the storage spaces manager shows that it cannot initialize one of the drives. with that particular drive plugged in, it shows up in the bios settings, and under devices in the control panel. however, whenever and attempt is made to access the drive, the system crawls to a halt. in fact, i had to unplug the drive during startup/bootup as Windows bootup would literally take > 20 minutes (vs 20 seconds) to start.

i just finished scanning/testing my brand new WD Red drives. contemplating what i do next, but i'm going to scan my drive using R-Studio and see if anything shows up as recoverable. fortunately, most of what i have on those disks replaceable, but it's going to be a pain...

 

[vexingv]

i just wanted to provide a quick update and some closure:

I scanned the faulty drive (and others as well) with R-Studio but was unable to find anything recoverable.

I decided to start anew. I purchased a total of 4x 3TB WD Red drives. I'm still using Windows 8, but I discovered a great solution called FlexRaid. While FlexRaid has been around for a few years in the form of providing snapshot type RAID, they only recently introduced transparent RAID that essentially provides software-based whole-disk RAID. it also offers a storage pooling option as well. What I really like is that the data is still accessible by the file system so any disk can be pulled and placed into a different system and still be accessed (unlike Windows 8 proprietary system). This time, I decided to setup parity with a RAID5-type setup using 1 drive as parity which will allow me to recover if one drive fails. The only downside with FlexRaid is that it is a paid product. But it still allows me to use Windows, which I'm much more comfortable with, and the system requirements are not as demanding as with FreeNas using ZFS. It was a pretty straightforward installation following some of their published wiki guides.

thanks again for all the help/input....

 

[mvr210]

I was able to move my OS disk and two out of 3 disks to a another PC. Storage Space came back on-line and was able to access and copy all the data.
Not sure if this will work for you, but hope it might help someone down the road.

 

[grimpr]

Consider using something more reliable and compatible than Storage Spaces with its non NTFS filestystem like Stablebits Drivepool.

 

[code65536]

Consider using something more reliable and compatible than Storage Spaces with its non NTFS filestystem like Stablebits Drivepool.

You mean, consider using something that isn't like RAID-0?

Because Storage Spaces is pretty darn nice if you make use of parity or mirroring.

 

[grimpr]

You mean, consider using something that isn't like RAID-0?

Because Storage Spaces is pretty darn nice if you make use of parity or mirroring.

And its pretty much incompatible with its ReFS filesystem with about 99% of all filesystem recovery software out there in case something goes wrong. I dont advise jumping too early on microsoft new technology until its properly tested and made compatible with a lot of software, until then standard NTFS and Drive Pooling with file/folder duplication is the safest approach.