I've added three new, formatted, empty USB 3 drives to a win 8.1 system. The drives are read/writable with windows explorer, but the "storage pool" application will not recognize them ( or any other drive for that matter, I was going to include a screen capture showing device manager ( drives are working ), windows explorer ( drives are read writable ), and storage pool ( showing "no drives that work" even though I have 5 installed, but this site won't let me insert it ) and so will not create a storage pool using them. Anyone have any ideas on how to get "storage pool" to actually work?

If you are able to find the USBs in explorer but cant find while creating storage pool, please make it sure that its NTFS formatted otherwise it system will ignore them.

If still have questions, I suggest to have a look on the step by step guide with screenshots available at:

https://www.winhelp.us/storage-spaces-in-windows-8.html