Windows Software RAID with USB Drives

[teleos]

I have an Orico USB drive enclosure that currently has two 12TB SATA drives in them and I can use the individual drives just fine.

But when I try to set up disk mirroring in Windows with either disk manager or storage spaces I always get an error about "operation not supported" or "sector size not supported".

I thought software RAID is supported with USB drives, what am I missing?

 

[Lord Evermore]

I thought Storage Spaces would do it. You may need to trick Windows into thinking they are not removable disks using a registry flag, after which Disk Management will allow it. Of course you do lose some of the protections for data when the OS is aware that they are removable, such as "optimize for quick removal" which ensures data is written to disk before saying that the operation is completed.

You may also be able to just change those optimizations in Device Manager rather than changing the flag in the registry, which will still mean losing the protections. You would need to always use the Eject option before disconnecting the drives, though I'm not sure whether that would still break the array since Windows would detect a drive being removed.

https://superuser.com/questions/1067593/connecting-a-usb-flash-drive-to-storage-spaces

 

[teleos]

That could be it, let me give it a try. Thanks a lot!

 

[teleos]

I'm running Windows 11 Pro and the only Policy I can find in Device Manager is write-caching... I don't see a "Better Performance" policy.

 

[Lord Evermore]

I'm running Windows 11 Pro and the only Policy I can find in Device Manager is write-caching... I don't see a "Better Performance" policy.

Just turn on write caching. In Windows 10 you have to select "Better Performance" and all it does is make the write cache checkbox available. A rare instance of Windows 11 actually eliminating a step, but having the "Quick removal" option as a default does make it more clear that it's a different configuration and what the benefit is so it still seems like a step backward. They should have made it a compromise between the two, with Better Performance simply enabling write cache without a separate checkbox, and the sub-box for buffer flushing being on it. (After all, if you uncheck the write cache box, that's the same as selecting Quick Removal.)

 

[Paladin]

Quick recommendation: don't do RAID at all. Use one as normal, use a good backup program to do backups (with compression and deduplication if possible) to the other. Better than RAID in this kind of situation since it eliminates the performance issue of having to write to two drives over the USB bus for every data write and it lets you keep multiple backups (at least 2 hopefully, depending on how much you use the drive). It simplifies things as well and you can swap the second drive for an offsite backup storage option if you want.

 

[Lord Evermore]

it eliminates the performance issue of having to write to two drives over the USB bus for every data write

I don't think there would be a write speed issue here. Given that they're mechanical drives, it's not like the bus isn't going to be sitting there just idling most of the time anyway; it will send a block of data to a drive until the disk's cache is full then have to wait around for the write to finish. Even two SATA SSDs would be saturated with a 10Gbps USB connection. It may even be a tiny bit FASTER at writes since it has to write the same data to both but it will be able to start sending the data to the second drive before the first one has finished writing (at least part of the time; possibly just cutting a bit of latency at the beginning of a write), but it won't be slower, and it will allow faster reads. This assumes the controller in the enclosure is itself capable of writing to both drives simultaneously; I can't imagine it not being that way as we stopped dealing with that when IDE went away and SATA hub functionality never appeared, and since it's a cloning device it would be stupid to double the amount of time required. The point about backups of course is true regardless of which way it's done, but whether that matters depends on just what the use case is. Higher speed may be more important than high reliability or having multiple backups.

 

[teleos]

I turned on "Better Performance" and it's working with Storage Spaces but not Disk Management. Apparently the "Better Performance" option only shows up for removable drives.

These are 5400rpm drives and I'm getting >100MB/s on large file copies, so I'm satisfied.

Now I just need to figure out what kind of backup schemes I want to have.

Thanks again to Lord Evermore for your help!