[Guide] How to remove a Physical Disk from Windows Storage Spaces WITH Parity

[Djinni]

Been bugging me for a while now that my USB drive was setup (incorrectly) as part of windows Storage Spaces and I've finally found a way to remove it. Thought it might be useful to some others on here, so here's the process:

Step 1: Close any programs that might be trying to use the Storage Pool you are trying to remove the drive from. Yes you can have more than storage pool)
Step 2: Open Windows PowerShell
Step 3: Use the following command to identify the Friendly Name of the correct physical disk that you want to remove

Get-PhysicalDisk

Step 4: Use the following command to identify the Storage Pool that you wish to remove the drive from.

Get-VirtualDisk

Step 5: Use the following command to "Retire" the Physical Disk from the storage This marks the drive as inactive and no further data will be written to it.

Set-PhysicalDisk -FriendlyName 'PhysicalDiskXX' -Usage Retired

Step 6: Rebuild the storage pool to compensate for the missing drive using the VirtualDisk storage pool that we got earlier, this is not quite the same as rebalancing, but its close enough for now that windows won't complain about there being a drive missing.

Repair-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName 'VirtualDiskYY'

This will likely take several hours so go play a game, sleep, go to work or whatever...

Step 7: Remove the retired drive from the Storage Space manager so that windows will not try to include it in the storage pool when it comes back online.

Remove-PhysicalDisk -FriendlyName 'PhysicalDiskXX'

That's it! Simple.

Full log below so you can see the results from each command as I ran it:

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-PhysicalDisk

FriendlyName        CanPool             OperationalStatus   HealthStatus        Usage                              Size
------------        -------             -----------------   ------------        -----                              ----
ST2000DL003-9VT166  False               OK                  Healthy             Auto-Select                     1.82 TB
WDC WD30EFRX-68E... False               OK                  Healthy             Auto-Select                     2.73 TB
WDC WD30EFRX-68E... False               OK                  Healthy             Auto-Select                     2.73 TB
PhysicalDisk1       False               OK                  Healthy             Auto-Select                   232.89 GB
SAMSUNG HD103SJ     False               OK                  Healthy             Auto-Select                   930.75 GB
ST1000DM005 HD103SJ False               OK                  Healthy             Auto-Select                   930.75 GB
Seagate Backup+     False               OK                  Healthy             Auto-Select                     3.64 TB


PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-VirtualDisk

FriendlyName        ResiliencySettingNa OperationalStatus   HealthStatus        IsManualAttach                     Size
                    me
------------        ------------------- -----------------   ------------        --------------                     ----
Storage space       Parity              OK                  Healthy             False                          10.79 TB


PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Set-PhysicalDisk -FriendlyName 'Seagate Backup+' -Usage Retired
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Repair-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName 'Storage space'
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Remove-PhysicalDisk -FriendlyName 'Storage space'

Obligatory DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible for any data loss or hardware failure that might result from the use of these commands, I will however accept requests for assistance via mail delivered by Owl. The commands listed above are ones that have proven to work on my system and as always any written commands should be checked and double checked before execution as they are prone to misspellings and bad syntax which can cause in-intended data loss or other side effects...

Original source: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/...=winserver8gen