Hello Paul,

When drives are in the primordial pool, are they visible in disk management?

Yes. When you add new drives, they will appear in both. You can bring the new drives online and initialize them, and they will still be visible in disk management and storage pools. If you create a new volume on a drive using disk management, it will no longer be available to use with storage pools, and will be removed from the primordial pool.

Suppose your OS crashes and has to be reinstalled. What happens to the storage pools and associated storage spaces created under that original OS?

Storage Spaces records information about pools and storage spaces on the physical disks that compose the storage pool. Therefore, your pool and storage spaces are preserved when you move an entire storage pool and its physical disks from one computer to another, or reinstall the operating system.

Windows Server 2012 starts storage that could potentially be shared with a cluster in a safe state. For Storage Spaces, that means the first time Windows connects to a storage pool, the pool starts as read-only and the storage spaces will start in a detached state. To access your data, you must set the storage pool to read-write and then attach the storage spaces.

These steps do not apply to Windows 8 – storage pools start as read-write and storage spaces start as attached.

Great questions, if you need further clarification, let me know.

Thanks for watching,
Mike

Thank you for replying. Since this feature doesn't work quite the way it is represented I thought it should be called out before people install a bunch of Core servers thinking they can switch back to GUI at any time with no hassle.

I didn't notice this in my labs because I keep it offline and didn't bother to update. I discovered it when I installed a Core DC at work for more PowerShell practice, updated and then decided to try adding the GUI back and found it doesn't work.

@David-Beem That's awesome! I am bookmarking the crap out of that. :) Thanks so much!