Unable to add drive to storage pool

I bought some new SSD drives for my test server that I run VMs on. The number of disks the system could handle was maxed out. So, I needed to shuffle around some data as part of the installation process.

During my shuffling, I temporarily added two of the SSD drives and used them as normal drives (not in a storage pool). Later, I deleted the data from those drives and wanted to create a new storage pool with those two drives. However, I found that when I ran the wizard to create the new storage pool, the drives were missing (not listed). They were also not listed in the primordial pool.

Using Server Manager, I tried:
  • removing volumes
  • resetting the drives
  • reinitializing the drives
  • taking the drives offline and online
  • changing between GPT and MBR
I saw some web site references to drives attached to RAID cards having duplicate identifiers, but mine were attached directly to the SATA interface and had unique identifiers. However, when I ran Get-PhysicalDisk, I noticed that the drives had a property CanPool set to False. This seemed a likely explanation for my issue.

After a quick bit of searching, I found that running Reset-PhysicalDisk should change the CanPool property to True. And it did. My surprise is that resetting the drive using Server Manager didn't reset that property to True.


Once I reset the disks with Reset-PhysicalDisk, I was able to create a new storage pool using those disks. And my test server has never been faster!

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