Then there is the fact its scubbing data from one place to another and thereby essential defragmenting the volume more or less automatically, over time. that its said to be "self-healing" and does not require CHKDSK anymore. Many of the information around ReFS make it sound a good decision, e.g. Next point is to decide which file system is better: NTFS or ReFS. So storage space seem to sound like a good idea over dynamic disk striping. Read speeds appear to be close to each other. Dynamic disks has always felt a bit risky, with lots of possible problems underneath and few industry support.
This kind of testing is not yet done, but I have reasonable experience with NTFS strips surviving such situations.Ĭomparing test results, it showed up that a Storage Space with a virtual partion in "Simple" mode appears to be reasonably faster in writing than a "standart" Windows disk stripe using dynamic disks. by power outage (unlikely, we have a 40 kwh 3-Phase UPS behind, everything has at least 2 PSUs) or (more likely) a broken cable/SFP link or lost controller.
The only risk is what would happen if a drive set fails, e.g. Given the RAID enclosure is being used in RAID6 mode, Windows does not really need to take care of it. While the actual numbers are not THAT important, they have been helpful in decding which way to go in the sheer endless mixture of possibilities. However, total disk space left for parity is 25%. So the first result was to use the chassis RAID controller in RAID6 mode, as the trade off over RAID5 is minimal: Read speads are identical, write speeds are 1/10th less, but the redundancy is far better (2 drive failures per 8 drive set). In fact, performance drops to as low as 1/4th possible otherwise, which is why I rule them ALL out at this point. Without going into detail I can summarize that the Storage Space redundancy features like Single or Dual Parity or Dual or Triple Mirror cost you a lot of disk space and performance.
Clearly I also looked into Simple Storage Space, but only for performance check, as this makes no sense security wise, as there is NO chance to survive any accident then. I have therefor formatted the FC enclosure either as 2x8 drive JBOD (2 FC host connections to two server ports), 2x8 RAID0, 2x8 RAID1, 2x8 RAID5 and 2x8 RAID6.įor JBOD and RAID0 I tried Storage Spaces with Single or Dual parity, and Mirror modes with Dual and Triple copies.
Beside many still not fully answered questions, there are a lot of findings I had, which I'd like to share here.įirst, I made a long set of tests comparing how to set up the storage. In attempt to design the best performance system for future server replacement in my company, I am currently investigating ways of connecting, controlling and using the storage and what results are shown. I am currently running extensive tests on a 16bay Dual 4 GBit RAID subsystem directly connected to a dual Hexacore Xeon server running Windows 2012 R2.