Disks not showing when setting up Storage Spaces

[Grennard]

Hello,

I'm trying to set up a software RAID solution called Storage Spaces in Windows 11. I want disk mirroring.

I have got two external HDD drives. One Seagate Expansion 6TB and the other WD Elements 3TB. When I go to Settings / System / Storage / Storage Spaces I'm asked to create a storage pool and select the available drives. But the 2 drives don't show up and I see a message that there are no available disks to create a Storage Pool.

I'm a little confused, because It's not the first time I'm setting up a Storage Pool. I've done it at home before with two WD Passport Ultra drives (one 1TB and the other 2TB) and it works.

So what is the problem? I remember that both drives should be unpartitioned for them to show in the list. However I tried now with partitioned, unpartitioned, with and without EFI System Partition and nothing works, the disks don't show up. Is it a hardware issue? Do the disks have to be software RAID enabled hardwarewise? Or is it a Windows issue?

Any hints would be welcome. Thank you so much.

 

[yodap]

Do the partitioned disks have drive letters?

 

[Grennard]

When partitioned they have drive letters assigned. When unpartitioned they don't.

I'm partitioning/unpartitioning in Windows 11 native disk manager.

Should they have disk letters assigned or rather not?

 

[yodap]

Disclaimer, I don’t know much about RAID (never saw the point, but I don’t have lot’s of important data to back up) and never used Storage Spaces. Regular disk back-ups is all I do. It seems the one thing you didn’t try was partitioned/no drive letters. You can do that in disk manager.

I always thought RAID needed to be set up in the BIOS and on system connected drives, not external but the software may bypass that. I’m going to look into it though. Good luck.