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I have an external USB enclosure that is presenting the physical disks to my Windows Server 2016 operating system with identical UniqueIDs.

As a result, I cannot use the Server Manager > Storage Spaces UI to create a "Parity" disk (because the UI only lists the first disk it sees with that singular UniqueID).

So, while I'm waiting to hear back on a ticket opened with the vendor, I am trying to use Powershell instead.

This web page provides a good overview: https://terrytlslau.tls1.cc/2012/10/configuring-storage-pool-by-powershell.html

But, there seems to be something amiss - presumably at the point of creating the VirtualDisk.

In my case, I have five 3.64TB drives that I would like to configure in "Parity" (RAID5) mode.

I've successfully created a storage pool (called "ExternalPool") with those five drives:

Get-StoragePool -FriendlyName ExternalPool | Get-PhysicalDisk

FriendlyName       SerialNumber CanPool OperationalStatus HealthStatus Usage          Size
------------       ------------ ------- ----------------- ------------ -----          ----
Oyen Mobius Pro D2 [omitted]    False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select 3.64 TB
Oyen Mobius Pro D3 [omitted]    False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select 3.64 TB
Oyen Mobius Pro D4 [omitted]    False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select 3.64 TB
Oyen Mobius Pro D5 [omitted]    False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select 3.64 TB
Oyen Mobius Pro D1 [omitted]    False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select 3.64 TB

The next step has me creating a VirtualDisk using the following command:

New-VirtualDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName ExternalPool -FriendlyName ExternalDisk -Size 18.2TB -ResiliencySettingName Parity -ProvisioningType Thin

...even though the "ResiliencySettingName" is "Parity" the above command results in a virtual drive that is the full 5 x 3.64 = 18.2TB in available size.

In other words, it appears that no space is being set aside to store the parity bit; I would have expected the resulting RAID5 volume to have been 4 * 3.64 = 14.56TB in size.

So, what am I missing? - I've tried specifying different sizes in the "New-VirtualDisk" command, but in each case the available space does not match what would be expected for a RAID5 volume.

Thanks in advance!

nhelder
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  • and whats gone wrong for now? i did not got the point... if yozr thinking why you loose space this is mostly due to the fact of 1000 to 1024 – djdomi Sep 02 '19 at 05:51
  • Thanks for the question, djdomi. I've added some edits to the post in an effort to clarify, but the short version is I'm _not_ seeing a loss of space when attempting to create a RAID5 array using the above `New-VirtualDisk` command - and that has me concerned that it isn't actually creating a RAID5 array, but is creating a JBOD array instead. – nhelder Sep 03 '19 at 10:42

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