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Storage Spaces Questions

A

Azhar

Fixing stupid since 1972
Joined
Jan 9, 2001
Messages
18,877
Been reading the past couple days on how much stride Microsoft's made with the introduction of Storage Spaces and ReFS (in Server 2012 Storage Spaces). Any reason why I shouldn't use it to manage my 16TB media server (8x2TB)? I plan on using parity resiliency.

I understand that I'm going to need to do some juggling. As it stands, the movies are all on independent 2TB disks (i.e. Action movies on one drive, Sci-Fi on another, Terror on another, etc) and if I wish to pool them all, I'd have to move the movies off the drive I add to the pool because it'll format it first. I'm ready for that chore if it means a peace of mind when it's all done.

My concern however is I've been reading articles here and there about Storage Spaces' inability to rebalance drives once you add them all to the pool. Has this issue been addressed in R2 of Server 2012 or has there been tools made that'll help rebalance data between drives?
 
Parity on storage spaces is slow. Really slow.

I am using mirrored storage spaces at work and the speed is fine. For media on windows you may just want to use Snapraid/Flexraid and a drive pooling software.
 
Parity in Storage Spaces/ReFS is glacially slow even if you are on fast hardware. If you are just looking for a single point to find your media, check XBMC or Plex and you can put your media wherever you want. If you just want a single mountpoint/parity/resiliency then look at one of the ZFS AIO packages.
 
but is it so slow that compressed (high profile in Handbrake) MKV can't stream to one or two computers at a time over GigE ethernet? The media server in question runs on AMD A4 with an FM2 board. Nobody's going to be touching the server otherwise. It's headless and only used for media storage.
 
That GUI is horribly out of date though.

Latest release:
"Catchup and support SnapRAID 2.0"

SnapRAID recently released version 6.0...


There is no need for a GUI anyways, SnapRAID is simple.
 
There is no need for a GUI anyways, SnapRAID is simple.
Click to expand...

I agree with that. There are like 4 commands to use for the most part.

snapraid sync
snapraid diff
snapraid scrub
and hopefully rarely used: snapraid fix

That GUI is horribly out of date though.

Latest release:
"Catchup and support SnapRAID 2.0"
Click to expand...

As a windows programmer I most likely could fix this however I absolutely do not have the time.
 
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Azhar said:
but is it so slow that compressed (high profile in Handbrake) MKV can't stream to one or two computers at a time over GigE ethernet?
Click to expand...
From what I recall, with 6x 3TB drives, I was getting write speeds around 25MB/s. Converting it to a simple volume resulted in reads and writes over 800MB/s.
 
since you guys mentioned poor write performances, I've been researching more about this and I see an overwhelming amount of complaints where users copy data to a parity array starting at 25MB/s and watching it drop off to a virtual standstill for hours. Seems Microsoft is playing it too safe writing parity data. Looks like I'll be using SnapRAID.

My media server's been running fine for about 2 years now, but I always have this nagging feeling that I'm asking for trouble by not having some sort of parity protection against hard drive failure.

My Windows Home Server 2011 500GB drive is C: and my 2 terabyte drives are E:, F:, G:, H: I:, J:, K: and L:. I'm assuming the first thing I do is install SnapRAID for Windows 64-bit, then what would I need to do to pool all eight of these 2TB drives so that there's 7 drives in one single pool, and a parity drive?

I know I can study the manual, but I thought I'd save time and ask since you guys probably already know what I need to do, haha.
 
Stablebit Drivepool will do what you want, using existing NTFS drives and without hurting read or write performance. Think Windows Home Server's original Drive Extender technology, but for 2014.
 
One more vote for SnapRAID for parity, and Stablebit DrivePool for pooling. This is the current killer combo for home media storage, and one I've been using for a long while now. I used to be diehard hardware RAID for home media (over a decade). At a certain point, it stopped making sense.

Both developers are very active, pushing out new builds on an almost nightly or weekly basis. Some of the features in both products were things I suggested and got the developer to implement -- so they're very open to feedback. SnapRAID is free, and DrivePool is only $19.95 with a 30-day trial. I'd pay 10x or 20x the price for this combo.

You'd be absolutely insane to place your home media files on Storage Spaces. The reasons why have already been discussed to death. And there's no need to place home media data on a striping based RAID system like SS, same goes for hardware RAID and ZFS. That only adds unnecessary abstraction layers and additional risk.
 
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DPI said:
One more vote for SnapRAID for parity, and Stablebit DrivePool for pooling. This is the current killer combo for home media storage, and one I've been using for a long while now. I used to be diehard hardware RAID for home media (over a decade). At a certain point, it stopped making sense.

Both developers are very active, pushing out new builds on an almost nightly or weekly basis. Some of the features in both products were things I suggested and got the developer to implement -- so they're very open to feedback. SnapRAID is free, and DrivePool is only $19.95 with a 30-day trial. I'd pay 10x or 20x the price for this combo.

You'd be absolutely insane to place your home media files on Storage Spaces. The reasons why have already been discussed to death. And there's no need to place home media data on a striping based RAID system like SS, same goes for hardware RAID and ZFS. That only adds unnecessary abstraction layers and additional risk.
Click to expand...

you wouldn't use SnapRAID for pooling then? I read about SnapRAID pooling and the author complains about Windows' troublesome way of handling symlinks when pooling multiple drives. So I'm guessing you're recommending creating the parity with SnapRAID, then pool the drives with StableBit?
 
Azhar said:
you wouldn't use SnapRAID for pooling then? I read about SnapRAID pooling and the author complains about Windows' troublesome way of handling symlinks when pooling multiple drives. So I'm guessing you're recommending creating the parity with SnapRAID, then pool the drives with StableBit?
Click to expand...

Thats the way to do it.
 
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