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Before trying it out - I don't find any documentation.

Given that Storage Pools have serious performance problems with parity, and do not rebalance data at the moment when you add discs, my preferred way to use them would be as think provisioned space, ISCSI targets - with every "Pool" running against 1 RAID that comes from a Raid controller (who also introduces SSD read and write caching - another thing missing from Storage Pools).

The main question is - how does a Storage Pool handle the change in the underlying disc that can happen? I mostly talk about OCE (Online Capacity Expansion), where a disc after an expansion suddenly reports a larger space.

Standard Windows allows you to use this additional space (and expand the partitions). How does a storage pool handle it?

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For me in testing, expanding the physical underlying disk yielded odd results. get-physicaldisk in PowerShell and the Server Manager Storage Spaces did not show the disk being larger after reboot. In the legacy Disk Management or using get-disk in PowerShell DID show the additional space on disk, but I see no way to add it to an existing Storage Pool.

I tried to find a storage Cmdlet to resize/grow/expand/extend a Storage Pool but didn't see one.

You can't add it to a new Pool because Pool's are disk-based and the physical disk is already in a Pool. Since that Pool disk was being used for a Virtual Disk I could not remove it to try and re-add it.

So either I'm doing it wrong, or Windows Server 2012 Storage Pools can not deal with underlying physical disks expanding.

Note in my testing, what I did was shutdown a 2012 VM and expand a 2nd .vhd file, which would be the virtual equivalent of expanding a physical RAID set on a server.

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  • Ok, now that sucks. So they do not rebalance their data, they do not allow capacity expansions- back into the world of static Setups we havd like 20 years ago. Only way to get capacity larger, sensibly, then is to make a backup/restore cycle on a storage pool. Plus terrificly bad write Performance for non-straight/mirror - there we go. I will take my Chance with a pool of 2x8 in a Raid 5 then, i think. Or 1x16 in a Raid 16 and wait what happens.
    – TomTom
    Oct 8, 2012 at 5:44
  • Yea this is a 1.0 release of Storage Pools, so I wasn't expecting too much. I certainly wouldn't consider it something "we should all implement" without careful consideration like you're doing. Oct 8, 2012 at 10:18
  • Thanks. So far it Looks GREAT on paper, with SIGNIFICANT Problems - mostly around low perforamnce for RAID Level saving, no rebalancing and now the inability to even increase the size of underlying discs - I seriously think I will stick with a ReFS large volume for now, adding 16 disc in possibly a RAID 6 or two. Too bad - I hope MS cranks that up, would be sweet, but they Need to really catch up with ZFS here to be something worth considering.
    – TomTom
    Oct 8, 2012 at 19:25

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