Anyone use Windows Storage Spaces?

[Maxvla]

Looking for input on Storage Spaces, which I'm planning to use in my next rig. I've read quite some professional reviews, most of which are from the professional point of view (data centers/etc). I'm looking for consumer grade input on this storage scheme.

I'm planning to use Storage Spaces to condense my current set of drives to a few larger ones with mirrors (I currently have no fault tolerance). As I understand it, Storage Spaces is basically as fast as hardware RAID for this purpose, as it is more limited by drive speed than hardware or software calculation. Storage Spaces has some pretty nifty features to go along with it, but I'm wondering if it actually works as advertised (simple, quick to set up, reliable). I'm currently on Win 7 for my main rig, but that will change to Win 10 soon as well as most of the rig getting updated, so I can't preview Storage Spaces yet as it is Win 8.1 and later.

 

[JrClocker]

Never heard of this...am just reading about it. It basically looks like a Windows RAID setup.

1. Simple Spaces: looks like either RAID 0 or JBOD
2. Mirror Spaces: looks like RAID 1
3. Parity Spaces: looks like RAID 5

I'll keep digging to see if there are more positives to doing it within Windows versus hardware.

Did you find anything about rebuilding the "space" after a drive failure...and how difficult/easy this is?

 

[Maxvla]

I may have seen a review where a drive failure was demonstrated, but I don't recall how SS handled it. I'm only interested in the Mirror Spaces as the other versions are significantly slower than hardware counterparts.

 

[JrClocker]

Mirror space seems like RAID 1...

Need to figure out how easy/fast to rebuild after a drive failure.

Is the "parity" space slower than the hardware too? Typically a RAID 5 has better read performance.

 

[Maxvla]

It is significantly slower than hardware RAID5. I mostly want to use this so I don't have to deal with setting up hardware raid, or having to use Linux, etc.

 

[Mpegger]

I read a article recently, that gave credence to Storage Spaces being made and targeted for large data centers, as the benefits of using it aren't really apparent unless you are a power user with a minimum of 12+ drives in the pool. It just isn't worth using it for the home and just a couple of drives, as the best and most secure way to set it up for data integrity would have you lose at least 1/2 your storage space for mirroring of files across drives.

Me personally, I'm going back to a regular setup with DrivePool and dumping ZFS.

 

[Maxvla]

It just isn't worth using it for the home and just a couple of drives, as the best and most secure way to set it up for data integrity would have you lose at least 1/2 your storage space for mirroring of files across drives.

But that is what I'm looking to do.

 

[woodman99]

But that is what I'm looking to do.

 

[woodman99]

My xp is that you wont like SS on win desktops after a while due to lack of controls and performance, tried that- didnt like it, maybe was HW restricted, and now desktops i use HW raid w/couple ssd's. SS server versions is easy w/ powershell or gui storage mgr(lots of documentation/guides available) had a mirrored drive failure and replaced it easily like in hw raid. I thought speed was so important that i couldnt live with SSparity but after longtime testing on 2012r2 essentials 8x2tb i love it. in fact, Just did import today that was 540mb/s from AM2 x2 SSparity spaces.