You wouldn't believe how hard it was to find a simple tutorial on this. Everyone else is either a hobbyist or an IT pro looking to expand their homelab. More power to em but i just want a storage drive lol. Thanks SO much for making this simple and easy to understand for us noobs ❤
Did this for a friend who lost their business computer data from a failed HDD (external drive backups stopped about 6 months prior). I built them a new system with 2x2TB drives running parity through Windows rather than hardware raid as I have had bad luck recovering from hardware raid failure. Windows made this very easy and you do a great job showing this!
This was an amazing beginner level tutorial that almost everyone can follow. I really appreciate you showing some troubleshooting steps for common errors. I'm a Linux systems administrator so even I learned something new about NAS and windows troubleshooting steps. Thanks CJ ♥️
I've knew about them on server editions since the window 8 era (we had machines on the company running windows server on mirrored drives by software) . I had no idea it was also available on Windows 10/11 until a couple of months ago
You should do an rclone tutorial after this! It changed my backup life! I run a batch file with a hotkey after the workday is done and BAM synced to storage pool and Backblaze B2 in 2 minutes
I use a program called Drive Bender. It pools the drives, but you can duplicate data down to the folder level, meaning you can pick what data you want to have redundancy. I've got around 20 tb of mixed drives on an older pc that also is running Plex and Emby servers, and acts as my NAS.
You mentioned that those beginner videos don't get watched as much because your audience, in general, is more advanced than these videos. However they are still highly appreciated by people like me :) Thanks
Having resiliency is great, but I still prefer to have a separate mirror backup on a single external drive like those Seagate Desktop Expansion or the WD My Book in case of natural disaster or emergency situation, you can grab the backup drive and bring it with you.
Heh heh, I've wanting to do this for years but wanted to do a lot of testing before "putting it into production" at home. After a bunch of putting it off and forgetting, I finally set up a test system, re-using some old drives to mess with. I hit both problems at 10:00 and figured the drive was bad. Good to see what I need to do since that's part of what I'm doing here - trying and learning. After I'm done fooling around adding/removing drives, I plan on using the actual brand-new disks on the test system and then do the ultimate test: move to another PC (the system I want to run it on). It's supposed to work. If it doesn't then I'll start over. But if it does work, then I have faith that I can recover from any failed component, including the computer. Then, I'll have a good affordable NAS that can grow leaving me with the next task, a good back up strategy.
Huh. I’ve been drivepooling my server with stablebit drivepool for a a few years now and never knew this was a feature in windows. Not likely to switch over (rebuilding 50tb of data? No thanks!) but this is really fascinating information.
Thank you, I was looking for a quick simple way to share a large pool of drives through out my home network, I dont want to build a full blown free nas server, this is just the quick simple thing i was looking for.
Great video. I was considering building a NAS using TrueNAS scale but I was concerned about the need for specialized RAM and lack of flexibility of adding new storage within ZFS. Windows seems to be the right choice for me. But can you cover how to run this server headless?
I did this exact setup by chance, Win 11 Pro, 4 - 6 TB Western Digital drives, my write speeds are absolute trash. To the point where it stops to let the disks catch up seemingly. Researching the fixes now.
I can't wait for the day to do this, I got a power mac g5 in storage that is dead (the PSU that is) but one day I will gut it and turn it into a Nas and server for small things
I am curious why you choose to do parity on SMR drives? There are some major potential for recovery time issues with SMR drives when using parity. -- Oops they are CMR Would have been nice to see you fully simulate the recovery part of the process (show recover time and such) so people could see what is typical during that type of situation.
Hi Bro, It was Nice video , thank you , i have question here what will happen in case OS crashed and Installed new OS will be data remains safe and storage configuration will be same as earlier or all data invisible.
Great but I wonder how to ensure (a) data security through ransomwares, viruses etc. on network (b)share it over internet and be available on other os like Linux, android.
Hihi! This is really useful! But I got a question. Let's say my PC has all the drive bays maxed out with all of the hdds having some stuff in there alr. Now if I want to remove one of the hdds to replace it with one that is higher in capacity what should I do? Esp if I have two way mirror on?
There needs to be other options to sponsor you other then Patreon. I do enjoy your content and would love to support you thru youtube channel membership if that was an option. You are one of the few that use the community builder on here. ~~~ I do not want talk bad about company; I once worked for but there are things they are not doing that make using them dangerous. ~~~
Everything is fine n all. I appreciate the video, but one thing is kinda funny when you say very cheap and even free and pull out those seagate Ironwolf😢
What happens if your PC fails but the pooled drives are still fine? Is it possible to transfer the drives to another PC with the data still accessible?
how to solve "storage space cannot be extended because the number of clusters will exceed the maximum number of clusters supported by the file system" proplem ?
thank you so much, awesome video and thx for simulating failures too. one thing you did not cover is how would you know which 4tb HD failed? in your example you pulled the sata, but in real world you would not know which one failed and they don't have disk names (unallocated when installed) so how would you know which HD to replace? thx
The average consumer won't be able to controll this other then buying drives from different vendors, but I can say I bought all my Seagate drives from Amazon at the same time and all of them have separate lot numbers.
Excellent, thank you for this superb tutorial. Easy to follow and to the point with no rambling on irrelevant topics. I echo the comment below "You wouldn't believe how hard it was to find a simple tutorial on this" by @TedWilder. Again thank you this was exactly what I was looking for🙂
Thanks and you're right. I usually just use the Win+X shortcut. However, I teach the search bar as it can be used for all windows Programs and Settings.
I would suggest something like Nextcloud with a Cloudflare tunnel and a secure login with an account (for example email and password or GitHub account) before the Nextcloud login. That way you can access your data through browser anywhere in the world without portforwarding anything. At most you would need to buy a domain and thats it, iirc.
I have 3 SSD’s set up with storage spaces in parity and it works fine but they’re attached using a USB dock. Does anyone know how to tell which one is which assuming one goes bad?
Presuming the motherboard or cpu fails, and the OS needs to be rebuilt or reinstalled, is there any way to recover the parity HDD configuration and restore your data on a new system?
Question: My motherboard fails, or my cpu fails and I change MB and CPU. How can I get the data from those drives? In a single drive I just plug it in my new system.
why not work for me ... i make step by step and dident see my " pool " sistem... 1 pc its see but cant acceses... and rest 2 pc and 2 laptops dident see .. why ?..
I have some questions. FIrst off, is Storage pool new? Its just weird that a bunch of people this year has talked about converting old PC into nas. alright real question time, I know there are cool nas software that I think you have even talked about where you can share a file from your nas with someone on the internet. Can someone do this on a windows nas? also any recommendations on software to use? I wanted the ltt video and grabbed "Winaero Tweaker" but don't really know what features are good to have. I use parsec to connect to the nas when I need to.
No its not new at all and Parsec is a good option to remotely access your system. You can map your network drive so anyone you want can access it from outside your local network. It is very easy to do in Windows however, many people will also have to also configure settings in their router. This will be different depending on your router so I didn't cover that.
One way , use the "Task Scheduler" find \Microsoft\Windows\DiskDiagnostic, and set the task named "Microsoft-Windows-DiskDiagnosticResolver" to enabled, it is disabled by default.
In simple mode, if one drive fails do we really lose data on ALL the drives? I thought we would only lose data on one drive even when running RAID 0/simple mode on windows.
You can probably recover some data but as far as I know you won't be able to do it within the OS. You would need a third party tool. However, officially, according to the Microsoft documentation a drive failure results in total data loss
Found my answer... I wonder who would use 3-way mirror, as it lose too much space for "quorum", because the formula is 3n+2 drives, to have n drives available for storage. Using 5 disks to have space of 1, for the minimum setup, is crazy! 😅
You wouldn't believe how hard it was to find a simple tutorial on this. Everyone else is either a hobbyist or an IT pro looking to expand their homelab. More power to em but i just want a storage drive lol. Thanks SO much for making this simple and easy to understand for us noobs ❤
I agree 100%, I wanted to do something simmilar and to even get to this video I had to search a bunch of different keywords
Omg, this is the 50th video I have watched on YT, and finally I found what I’m looking for. Thank you man
Did this for a friend who lost their business computer data from a failed HDD (external drive backups stopped about 6 months prior). I built them a new system with 2x2TB drives running parity through Windows rather than hardware raid as I have had bad luck recovering from hardware raid failure. Windows made this very easy and you do a great job showing this!
This was an amazing beginner level tutorial that almost everyone can follow. I really appreciate you showing some troubleshooting steps for common errors. I'm a Linux systems administrator so even I learned something new about NAS and windows troubleshooting steps. Thanks CJ ♥️
Bro, your tutorials are the best. Easy enough for an absolute beginner but not dumbed down so still great for an experienced person.
HOW IS THIS THE FIRST TIME I'M HEARING ABOUT STORAGE POOLS IN WINDOWS????????
This is exactly what I was looking for! Thank you!
because I think its called storage spaces and its only on windows 8 and maybe 10 plus servers.
I've knew about them on server editions since the window 8 era (we had machines on the company running windows server on mirrored drives by software) . I had no idea it was also available on Windows 10/11 until a couple of months ago
You should do an rclone tutorial after this! It changed my backup life! I run a batch file with a hotkey after the workday is done and BAM synced to storage pool and Backblaze B2 in 2 minutes
I know this is two years old...but can you just say.... "forgediboudit"
Or "dat foogn guy"
Would make my year
I use a program called Drive Bender. It pools the drives, but you can duplicate data down to the folder level, meaning you can pick what data you want to have redundancy. I've got around 20 tb of mixed drives on an older pc that also is running Plex and Emby servers, and acts as my NAS.
You mentioned that those beginner videos don't get watched as much because your audience, in general, is more advanced than these videos. However they are still highly appreciated by people like me :) Thanks
Great video! Finally, a simply way explained for a mass storage. Thanks for the video!
Having resiliency is great, but I still prefer to have a separate mirror backup on a single external drive like those Seagate Desktop Expansion or the WD My Book in case of natural disaster or emergency situation, you can grab the backup drive and bring it with you.
Loekey a horrible idea, specially the wd one lmfao that's asking to grab ur ext. Drive only for it to not work since it's been sitting
Heh heh, I've wanting to do this for years but wanted to do a lot of testing before "putting it into production" at home. After a bunch of putting it off and forgetting, I finally set up a test system, re-using some old drives to mess with. I hit both problems at 10:00 and figured the drive was bad. Good to see what I need to do since that's part of what I'm doing here - trying and learning.
After I'm done fooling around adding/removing drives, I plan on using the actual brand-new disks on the test system and then do the ultimate test: move to another PC (the system I want to run it on). It's supposed to work. If it doesn't then I'll start over. But if it does work, then I have faith that I can recover from any failed component, including the computer. Then, I'll have a good affordable NAS that can grow leaving me with the next task, a good back up strategy.
Nice to see the CJ64 in the background :)
Huh. I’ve been drivepooling my server with stablebit drivepool for a a few years now and never knew this was a feature in windows. Not likely to switch over (rebuilding 50tb of data? No thanks!) but this is really fascinating information.
Thank you, I was looking for a quick simple way to share a large pool of drives through out my home network, I dont want to build a full blown free nas server, this is just the quick simple thing i was looking for.
TIL: Windows has native storage support. I thought all of these features perished with the discontinuation of Windows Home Server. Neat!
Bro your channel is awesome! Your presentations are always clearly communicated. Keep them going and Happy Holidays to you and yours.
At 12:53, that's good to know. I will make sure to create a folder to share rather than share the root.
Great tutorial! Also, Jack Sprat sat on a SATA. Serial Advanced Technology Attachment.
this is awesome this is gettin archived lol thanks
This video made me subscribe. Thanks for clarifying this whole thing. Now to find out how to implement what you’ve explained with my SSDs 👀
Great video. I was considering building a NAS using TrueNAS scale but I was concerned about the need for specialized RAM and lack of flexibility of adding new storage within ZFS. Windows seems to be the right choice for me. But can you cover how to run this server headless?
This is an excellent video. Thanks so much. I'll be watching this again and agian.
this is great even 2 years later.
I did this exact setup by chance, Win 11 Pro, 4 - 6 TB Western Digital drives, my write speeds are absolute trash. To the point where it stops to let the disks catch up seemingly. Researching the fixes now.
so helpful and thank you
Very well done. Best explanation I hsve seen. Thanks
I can't wait for the day to do this, I got a power mac g5 in storage that is dead (the PSU that is) but one day I will gut it and turn it into a Nas and server for small things
Appreciate this video man it was really helpful
Awesome! Simple! Keep it up!
Very nice and easy way to do. Thank you.
I am curious why you choose to do parity on SMR drives? There are some major potential for recovery time issues with SMR drives when using parity. -- Oops they are CMR
Would have been nice to see you fully simulate the recovery part of the process (show recover time and such) so people could see what is typical during that type of situation.
Seagate only uses SMR in their Baracuda drives. All their Ironwolf NAS drives are CMR.
@@ElevatedSystems Oh, my bad!
Hi Bro, It was Nice video , thank you , i have question here what will happen in case OS crashed and Installed new OS will be data remains safe and storage configuration will be same as earlier or all data invisible.
You can reinstall windows or move your storage pool to another windows PC and it will be recognized as a storage pool and all the data will be intact.
Love your video bro.
Thank you.
i know theres other services like TrueNAS but is there a way i can access this shared drive outside my home network?
Great but I wonder how to ensure (a) data security through ransomwares, viruses etc. on network (b)share it over internet and be available on other os like Linux, android.
Love your video. Very informative. I have 1 question. I have 8tb of storage and only wanted to make 5 accessible by password. How would I do that?
perfect thx
Is there a way to add VPN to this so you will be able to access the files while outside of the network?
Hihi! This is really useful! But I got a question. Let's say my PC has all the drive bays maxed out with all of the hdds having some stuff in there alr. Now if I want to remove one of the hdds to replace it with one that is higher in capacity what should I do? Esp if I have two way mirror on?
There needs to be other options to sponsor you other then Patreon. I do enjoy your content and would love to support you thru youtube channel membership if that was an option. You are one of the few that use the community builder on here.
~~~
I do not want talk bad about company; I once worked for but there are things they are not doing that make using them dangerous.
~~~
Unfortunately, RUclips hasn't graced me with the Join or Super Thanks options yet.
@@ElevatedSystems Understood.
Can i access it frome my phone?
Everything is fine n all. I appreciate the video, but one thing is kinda funny when you say very cheap and even free and pull out those seagate Ironwolf😢
what kinda of read/write speeds do you get with this system? great vid btw :D
What happens if your PC fails but the pooled drives are still fine? Is it possible to transfer the drives to another PC with the data still accessible?
Yes, put them all in another windows PC and it will recognize the pool.
@@ElevatedSystems Thanks!!
@@ElevatedSystems what happens with my pooled drives (and data insided) if I reinstall Windows?
What windows did you use ? And what windows will this NOT work on ?
Just why youtube why you don't have to send me a friggin notification that he uploaded just whyyyyyy, that's it Susan or whoever will pay for it
how to solve "storage space cannot be extended because the number of clusters will exceed the maximum number of clusters supported by the file system" proplem ?
thank you so much, awesome video and thx for simulating failures too. one thing you did not cover is how would you know which 4tb HD failed? in your example you pulled the sata, but in real world you would not know which one failed and they don't have disk names (unallocated when installed) so how would you know which HD to replace? thx
You can find it by the serial number.
@@ElevatedSystems thank you 👍
@ElevatedSystems - would it be possible to easily set this new drive pool up to he accessable when i am not home?
Is there a reliable PCI-e Sata expansion card that you would recommend? Online reviews are these cards all seem to indicate a coin flip....
Another question. Does this work with a none internet connection active ?
Don't buy drives from the same batch. In this way you mitigate simultaneous failing drives.
The average consumer won't be able to controll this other then buying drives from different vendors, but I can say I bought all my Seagate drives from Amazon at the same time and all of them have separate lot numbers.
This worked for a second but now it just shows media files and won’t let me share anything can’t seem to figure it out
Excellent, thank you for this superb tutorial. Easy to follow and to the point with no rambling on irrelevant topics. I echo the comment below "You wouldn't believe how hard it was to find a simple tutorial on this" by @TedWilder. Again thank you this was exactly what I was looking for🙂
Nice tutorial. But I have a feeling that this man never right-clicked the start button.
Thanks and you're right. I usually just use the Win+X shortcut. However, I teach the search bar as it can be used for all windows Programs and Settings.
I never had, just did it. Thank you for showing me something new.
Does anyone know how to access this type of storage from a different network - outside of home?
I would suggest something like Nextcloud with a Cloudflare tunnel and a secure login with an account (for example email and password or GitHub account) before the Nextcloud login. That way you can access your data through browser anywhere in the world without portforwarding anything. At most you would need to buy a domain and thats it, iirc.
I have 3 SSD’s set up with storage spaces in parity and it works fine but they’re attached using a USB dock. Does anyone know how to tell which one is which assuming one goes bad?
I did all this and gives me a permissions error? even though I give everyone full control? I hate windows never works correctly
Bro looks like he's from Testout
Presuming the motherboard or cpu fails, and the OS needs to be rebuilt or reinstalled, is there any way to recover the parity HDD configuration and restore your data on a new system?
You can move the storage pool to any Windows system and it will be recognized.
Question: My motherboard fails, or my cpu fails and I change MB and CPU. How can I get the data from those drives? In a single drive I just plug it in my new system.
Just plug the drives into any windows system and it will recognize the pool.
why not work for me ... i make step by step and dident see my " pool " sistem... 1 pc its see but cant acceses... and rest 2 pc and 2 laptops dident see .. why ?..
how would you port forward it
it doesn't work for me because it doesn't show up on another laptop
I have some questions. FIrst off, is Storage pool new? Its just weird that a bunch of people this year has talked about converting old PC into nas. alright real question time, I know there are cool nas software that I think you have even talked about where you can share a file from your nas with someone on the internet. Can someone do this on a windows nas? also any recommendations on software to use? I wanted the ltt video and grabbed "Winaero Tweaker" but don't really know what features are good to have. I use parsec to connect to the nas when I need to.
No its not new at all and Parsec is a good option to remotely access your system. You can map your network drive so anyone you want can access it from outside your local network. It is very easy to do in Windows however, many people will also have to also configure settings in their router. This will be different depending on your router so I didn't cover that.
How to make Windows notify me of any drive failure in the pool?
One way , use the "Task Scheduler" find \Microsoft\Windows\DiskDiagnostic, and set the task named "Microsoft-Windows-DiskDiagnosticResolver" to enabled, it is disabled by default.
In simple mode, if one drive fails do we really lose data on ALL the drives? I thought we would only lose data on one drive even when running RAID 0/simple mode on windows.
You can probably recover some data but as far as I know you won't be able to do it within the OS. You would need a third party tool. However, officially, according to the Microsoft documentation a drive failure results in total data loss
@@ElevatedSystems oh, okay. I didn't know that. Thanks for the reply CJ 👍
Wait! Why 3-way mirroring requires 5 drives? Was it a mistake? 🤔
To create a three-way mirror space in Windows Storage Spaces, you need at least five physical disks. This protects against 2 drive failures.
@@ElevatedSystems Hmm, odd math. I think I will research why is that. thanks
Found my answer... I wonder who would use 3-way mirror, as it lose too much space for "quorum", because the formula is 3n+2 drives, to have n drives available for storage. Using 5 disks to have space of 1, for the minimum setup, is crazy! 😅
Why didn't he get the big PC case?
Can't simply read. Its DISK manager
Power shell always has worse commands than command prompt.
You lost me at…..storage spaces
-space
no everyone is not welkom i juse a password and system i dont want in savty two!
I bet you anything you like this won’t work for me. It just won’t I’m sure of it 😂.
sooo i accidently formated my hard drive with a bunch of important things..............................
😬
🥶
Please turn your mic compression off or your sensitivity, it doesn’t sound normal and bothers meeeee