DS-4SSD - being weird - shows 3 disks plus raid-0 or something out of 4 disks


  • I have 4x 4TB WD blue drives in the DS-4SSD, in Windows 11.

    Diskpart shows 4 drives all of 4TB instead however, but I cannot seem to manipule the 4th disk

    Disk Manager shows 3 disks as 4TB drives and then a 4th protected/read only drive of 16tb..

    I am able to format 3 of the 4 drives and I think use them but I cannot do anything with the 4th fake drive

    How do I change this so I see just the 4 4TB drives instead of any raid?

    disk manager



  • @patrick visniewski Make sure none of the drives are being eaten up by Storage Spaces.


  • how do I do that? I checked storage spaces in settings and I do not see any entries so I think nothing is being used by it.

    What else can I check?

     

    empty storage spaces

    If I try to add some storage space it just lists a single sabrent drive rather than 3 or 4 drives.

    storage pool single option


  • How strange. I search for "disk" in settings and found "Manage Disks and Volumes"

    This showed all 4 drives, but did not show any as formatted. And showed only 1 as available to have a partition created. So I went ahead and did that and then inspected the other drives. On each it listed them as having been setup with an MBR partition style rather than GPT which is the opposite of what I did with the diskmgmt.msc. I setup all 3 available drives using GPT rather than MBR.....

    But after doing this all with "Disks & Volumes" it also all shows up the same way in diskmgmt.msc.

    Except originally even in Disks & Volumes it was showing up differently I thought.

    But I guess the lesson here is probably that if you are running Windows 11 for this, use the real windows 11 tools rather than the legacy tools.

    Also if you track these as open or closed issues you can consider this closed.

    But in case someone can find this useful, I

    1. went into each disk and clicked on properties for the disk
    2. changed the partition style to GPT
    3. Then went back to Disks & Volumes and clicked on create volume (partition) under the drive and created a partition normally

    So now I have all 4 drives available it seems


  • @patrick visniewski Thank you for the update. As to my above point, sometimes drives will be assigned to Storage Spaces automatically by Windows, which can cause issues with Device Management recognition. Sometimes also DiskPart must be used to clean drives for them to show up properly. In your case it is different, but yes we recommend GPT. It is weird that it transpired that way.


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