For the past few years, my home server has been running two different arrays. One 8 disk RAID10 array, and a large storage spaces array. As I’ve gotten other drives over the years, I’ve stuck them in the storage spaces array for anything that doesn’t require a lot of speed.
I was using the RAID10 array for files that I wanted to access quickly, but I was running into a few quirks. Mainly, since I was using consumer drives, I’d periodically hit an issue where the controller stops responding waiting for a drive to respond. This would then crash my server, causing me much annoyance.
Since I never saw this issue on my storage spaces array, I decided to relocate all the files on my RAID10 to another drive short-term so that I could wipe the array and get the individual drives back to storage spaces.
My storage controller for RAID is a RocketRaid 2720, so I set the drives up to be JBOD and off I went. Injected them into StorageSpaces, and moved the data on over.
However, I noticed that it was still a little quirky. Did some checking on the manufacturer’s website, and realized that I should have flashed it as a plain non-raid controller.
Since I had already moved the data over, I wasn’t sure if this was feasible, so I did some tests. I moved a drive from the this array to another port that wasn’t on the controller to see if storage spaces could read it. I mainly wanted to make sure that the rocketraid wasn’t doing anything funny with the drive. Amazingly, it showed right up.
I then reflashed it to be a simple storage controller with no RAID options. After I did that, I immediately had an issue where none of the drives for showing up. I run Hyper-V server as my Hypervisor, so I had to dig into it to see what was up, while panicking that I may have wiped out a bunch of data accidentally.
Turns out, I didn’t install the drivers for the reflash. Whoops! Installed those, and all the drives showed up in storage spaces, and everything has been stable for about a week now.