Creating Storage Pool using Hard Drives with identical FriendlyNames and UniqueIDs

Question

I've been trying to do some testing and comparing performance of software RAIDs using Windows Server 2022 versus other OSs and their software RAID solutions. I ran into a problem when I attempted to make a Storage Pool with my test drives using Windows Server 2022 (same issue in 2019, 2012, etc). The problem is that out of the eight (8) test drives, only one shows up using the GUI. After some digging around, the issue turned out to be that the drives were all reporting the same "FriendlyName" and "UniqueID" in Windows.

I tried using PowerShell to change the FriendlyNames of the drives to be different, but the Set-PhysicalDisk command only seems to be able to use the FriendlyName or the UniqueID of the drive to select which one you want to change and making any changes this way changed the FriendlyName on all the drives. I tried selecting the drives by number, serial number, and even using Select-Object -First 1 and in each case, changing one, changed them all.

My next attempt was to change the FriendlyNames in the Windows Registry for each drive, but even after a reboot and rescan in PowerShell, the Get-PhysicalDisk command still showed all the drives with the same FriendlyNames, even though the Device Manager showed the changed names.

I then tried to only attach one (1) drive to the system and change the FriendlyName on that drive, which of course worked. So I shut the system down and added a second drive. After booting back up, the first drive was now back to original FriendlyName and matched the second drive.

My next attempt was to shut the system down again and only attach one (1) drive to the system again and boot it back up. After booting it back up, I checked the Device Manager to see which drive was attached according to Windows (since those names stayed persistent between reboots). I then went to PowerShell and changed the FriendlyName of the drive to match the one in Device Manager. I then attached a 2nd drive without shutting down or restarting the system (hot-swap bays). After refreshing Device Manager to see which drive was now added, I again changed the FriendlyName of that drive to match the name in Device Manager. This seemed to be working, so I continued to do this for each of the eight (8) drives until all had unique FriendlyNames. The UniqueIDs were all still the same, but that didn't seem to matter.

I checked back in the GUI and it still only showed one of the drives as available for making a pool, so I made a new storage pool ("testpool") using that one drive. After refreshing the GUI again, another drive showed up as available to be added to a storage pool or create a new storage pool. I attempted to add that drive to the existing "testpool", but the GUI instantly failed.

I went back to PowerShell and tried to add the rest of the drives to the existing single drive storage pool using -CanPool $True, but that failed as well. I then tried adding one additional drive to the single drive storage pool and it worked. So I added the remaining drives to the existing storage pool one by one using PowerShell and Add-PhysicalDisk.

I now had a Storage Pool in the GUI showing with the correct space and drive numbers. The next step was to create a new Virtual Disk. The GUI, again, instantly failed to do this with an error about not have the required number of drives to make a Parity VirtualDisk even with eight (8) drives in the storage pool. So back to PowerShell and tried to create the VirtualDisk there. PowerShell New-VirtualDisk worked fine and I was able to create a VirtualDisk with MaximumSize and two (2) disk redundancy.

I ran my tests, deleted the VirtualDisk, made another using only one (1) disk for redundancy, and another after that using mirror of 4 columns. Each time running my tests and deleting the previous VirtualDisk before making the next.

So now to my question, is there a better/easier way for me to accomplish the task of creating a Storage Pool and Virtual Disks using drives with the same FriendlyName and UniqueID without having to add each drive one-by-one and changing it's FriendlyName without rebooting the system? It seems that being able to change the FriendlyName using the drive number from Get-PhysicalDisk or the SerialNumber from Get-PhysicalDisk would make this process so much easier, but every attempt I made, just gave me errors.

Sorry for explaining everything that I did and what I was able to do as a workaround, but I've seen a lot of posts about this same issue going back about a decade and no one had a solution to it. Found some solutions to the issue of the drives having the same FriendlyName and being able to change it using the UniqueID, but not when both were the same across multiple drives.

Answer 1

Hello GrumpySpud-3952,

Thank you for your question.

Here are 3 topics and articles on how to solve this type of problem you are facing:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/backup-and-storage/extend-stand-alone-tiered-storage-spaces

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/ie/en-US/5fd4320d-019e-4f09-a9b2-f8dac7139a3c/change-friendlyname-from-uniqueid?forum=winserverpowershell

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/ie/en-US/279a5fb2-80c8-4903-a03a-a2a611c22709/adding-drives-to-storage-pool-with-same-unique-id?forum= winserver8gen

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If the answer is helpful, please vote positively and accept as an answer.

Answer 2

Thank you for your reply, but none of those articles address the problem I'm facing. The first one explains how to extend existing storage pools and does not address any issues with drives have the same FriendlyName and UniqueID. The second article discusses how to change the FriendlyName using the UniqueID of the drive and does not apply to my problem because all of my drives have the same FriendlyName and the same UniqueID and attempting to change one will change all. In the third article they discuss how to add drives to a storage pool that have the same UniqueID but different FriendlyNames.

Answer 3

I had the same issue where two of my drives had identical friendly names and unique ids. The following worked for me (taken from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/storage/new-storagepool?view=windowsserver2022-ps)

$PhysicalDisks = (Get-PhysicalDisk -CanPool $True)  
New-StoragePool -FriendlyName CompanyData -StorageSubsystemFriendlyName "Windows Storage*" -PhysicalDisks $PhysicalDisks