I’ve made myself a striped “kamikaze RAID” volume a couple of years ago for video editing. It’s worked great until recently, when performance degraded a bit and it was time to re-create it. Turns out I had forgotten how to set it up, and I had no clue how to delete it either. Just in case this happens again, here are some notes on how the process worked.
Deleting the RAID
Windows Storage Spaces support RAID for redundancy (RAID1) and JBOD, but not performance striping, so Storage Spaces is NOT what we want to use here. Instead, Disk Management can create these strips from drives with unallocated space. To get rid of the current one though, we have to delete them first. However, that option was greyed out for me. DISKPART didn’t want to help me either. What’s going on?
Here’s why this happens: when Windows has a Page File on the drive you want to delete, it won’t let you do it. We need to remove the Page File first, then restart the system, and then we can remove the existing volume.
I’ve explained how to change the swap page options in a previous article. Follow that, pick your disks in question and set them all to “no page file” (make sure to click the Set option). Reboot and start deleting.
It goes without saying that this will destroy any data on the current stripe. Even if you re-assemble it from the same disks, all data will be lost.
Creating the RAID
Now it’s a matter of right-clicking one of the disks you want to use for the new stipe and choose New Striped Volume. In a subsequent dialogue, we have the option to add other disks to the setup. All available space will be pooled, and you can pick a drive letter and file system.
Once setup, the system has to format your new RAID. This can take some time depending on the size of your disks.
When Windows has finished, you’ll notice a small unallocated piece of space at the end of each disk that make up the RAID, except for the last one. This is perfectly normal and is a by-product of Windows converting your partitions to dynamic.
That’s it! Now we have a striped RAID volume that’s not a storage space with seriously increased read/write throughput.