I have been running a Drobo FS NAS system for about a year and a half now. However, I think it is time to move on to something else. The Drobo is an extra system that takes up space and runs all the time, but doesn't get used very much. I have recently been experimenting with Storage Spaces and really like what I see. Storage Spaces is a new "software RAID" feature built into Windows 8. It is very easy to use, although some people have reported performance issues particularly in the parity mode. I plan to use it as a mirrored system and it is for backups so performance is not my biggest concern.
Currently I have about 1.3GB of data sitting on my Drobo. I want to move that data to a Storage Space. However, I would like to use at least one of the two 2TB drives that are in the Drobo for the Storage Space. I could just rip the hard drive out of the Drobo and reformat it in the computer for Storage Spaces. The data would still be readable on the Drobo, but I wouldn't have any redundancy while I transferred the data. I came up with the following method to create the storage pool and still maintain redundancy. (I will need to delete some of my hoarded data to get down under 1TB for this to work.)
The only extra drive I have is a 1TB USB 3.0 drive, but I needed another drive to get the Storage pool created. The solution was to create a VHD drive and add it to the Storage pool. I created the 2TB VHD as dynamically expanding on a 16GB flash drive. Since I obviously didn't have enough space to let it expand all the way, I just removed it from the storage space. The storage space is still accessible, it just gives me a warning that there is no more redundancy. That is fine, since I will copy the data from the Drobo which is still redundant. If anything goes wrong with the storage space during the transfer, the Drobo will still be functional. After all the data is copied, I will have one complete set of data on the Drobo, which still has two drives in it, and another complete set of data on a Storage Space which only has one drive. I can then remove one drive from the Drobo and format it.
At this point I will still have two accessible sets of data on two different RAID like systems, but both of them will be giving me warnings that I should add another drive to gain redundancy. I can then take the drive that was originally in the Drobo and add it to the Storage Space along side the USB drive. After a while, Storage Spaces will duplicate the data between the drives and stop giving me warning messages. Finally the Storage Space will be fully operational and I can remove the last drive from the Drobo and turn it off.
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