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Which software RAID and FS for Server 2012?

D

dpajur

n00b
Joined
May 15, 2001
Messages
28
Hi folks,

I'm rebuilding my machine soon and I wanted to know what's the best option for a software raid these days? The OS will be Windows Server 2012, and I'd like to have parity for the data volume.

I have three 2TB drives set aside for this, and I have two questions:

1) NTFS or ReFS ?
Considering I won't be booting from this volume, should I go with ReFS instead?

2) Windows software RAID-5, or Storage Spaces with Parity Pool or Intel software RAID-5?
I don't plan on running more than one pool (volume). My motherboard is based on a X79 chipset. All three are software options, I'm just not sure about the performance. Intel RST has been around for a long time, and so had software RAID in Windows. Storage Spaces are a new thing but Microsoft claim that in case of hardware failure you can plug the drives into another (rebuilt) Windows Server 2012 and it will recognise them as a part of the pool.

As long as I can get decent read/write speeds (60-80MB/s) I'm happy. I just don't want the bottleneck to be my software RAID, I'd prefer it to be the gigabit network.
 
Storage Spaces is builtin and no additional cost is needed. It works, but performance isn't the best but I think you would get your desired speeds. I would also consider something like FlexRAID or SnapRAID to sit ontop of Windows.

I don't trust ReFS yet. It's very new, but does use SMB 3.0. windows 7 and below can read from it over the network, so that won't cause any problems. If it's what you would consider critical data, I would stick with NTFS.
 
I would use it for backups of the main system (which runs on SSD), a bunch of VHDs for test VMs and the odd thing that I'd have a copy of on the NAS, so no critical data really.

I figure NTFS might be better since ReFS doesn't support deduplication.

Now I just can't decide between storage spaces and the standard windows software raid-5 that comes via disk management.
 
If you are deciding between Windows RAID 5 and Storage Spaces, go with Storage Spaces. Give it a go, learn something new, share the experience.

Make sure you want to use SIS (Data Dedup) before you enable it. You can't get rid of it once you set it up. :)
 
Is there a downside to data deduplication? It seems like a no-brainer to me, don't know why I'd NOT want to have it, but now you have me worried :)
 
Well the space saving is very minimal with media (videos, music, etc) which is why I disabled it, which then did some strange things to my array which I fixed by rebuilding it.

The only negative I could think of would be performance, maybe? I'm not a Dedupe/SIS expert by any means.
 
Media data cannot be deduplicated unless you have duplicate files. And if you have data that can be deduplicated (e.g. VM images of the same OS) it usually results in severe fragmentation. I don't see any advantage for private use.
 
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