WIndows 8 Storage Spaces

nightelfmaster

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 28, 2004
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I'm considering building a system to hold a number of drives. I'm on a budget, so I would prefer if it were easily expandable in the future, while still providing redundancy. So far, the only systems that I know of that can manage mirroring/parity on varying size drives are integrated solutions such as Drobo and Synology, and some application solutions such as unraid. However, with Windows 8, there looks to be a really nice way to manage these drives, namely storage spaces (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/...rage-for-scale-resiliency-and-efficiency.aspx).

Has anyone had experience in setting up WIndows 8 Storage Spaces? I'm curious as to how to how it fares in handling data and ease of use. I'm considering setting up a system running the Win8 RP to manage this. Any thoughts on this solution or is there a nice solution like FreeNAS specifically designed to do this?
 
If you are planning to entrust it with data you cannot lose, remember you are running a preview version of the OS and that there have been stability issues up to the current release with Storage Spaces. YMMV but have at least a complete backup of all data you plan to put at risk.
 
If you are planning to entrust it with data you cannot lose, remember you are running a preview version of the OS and that there have been stability issues up to the current release with Storage Spaces. YMMV but have at least a complete backup of all data you plan to put at risk.

Most of the instabilities that I've found seem to be coming from the Win8 CP.

I found a wiki entry better describing the Win8 RP version of storage spaces:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com...Consumer_Preview_to_Windows_8_Release_Preview
 
If you are planning to entrust it with data you cannot lose, remember you are running a preview version of the OS and that there have been stability issues up to the current release with Storage Spaces. YMMV but have at least a complete backup of all data you plan to put at risk.

Agreed - do NOT use Storage Spaces on the pre-release versions of Windows 8 to store vital data unless it is backed up elsewhere. Going from the first preview release of Windows 8 Server to the most recent one, it refused to recognize my parity space, and it could not be repaired. Glitches like that in what should be a very fundamental piece of the OS make me disinclined to trust it with anything critical.
 
Linux. LVM has been around forever. It does pooling, striping and mirroring.
 
I've installed win server 2012, and storage spaces isn't ready yet. Disk fails and you can't evict it from the pool, you can get to a place where you can't do anything but format all your disks and start over.
 
I don't know why people insist on using Windows as a basis for file serving..

A) it's costs more money than alternatives and;
B) it's done better by just about anything,,, from Linux to Solaris.
 
Does Openfiler only scale to 60TB?

Not sure but their site says supports 60TB+ storage whereas other sites say up to 60TB. It's a strange statement to have 60TB as a number to choose when talking about scalability so I suppose there must be something in it.
 
I don't know why people insist on using Windows as a basis for file serving..

A) it's costs more money than alternatives and;
B) it's done better by just about anything,,, from Linux to Solaris.


A shitton of people have grown up on Windows. Most do not (or cannot) use the command line stuff required for any Linux. It's great for enthusiasts, but for common people, Windows is the default. That said, I've been using Amahi on Ubuntu, and while harder to set up than WHS, it is a viable replacement. Works very well, in fact
 
A shitton of people have grown up on Windows. Most do not (or cannot) use the command line stuff required for any Linux. It's great for enthusiasts, but for common people, Windows is the default. That said, I've been using Amahi on Ubuntu, and while harder to set up than WHS, it is a viable replacement. Works very well, in fact

Most businesses I have worked with still use Windows for file serving in distributed locations. Where they have centralised, its a mixture of Windows and Tier 1 storage (SAN).
 
A shitton of people have grown up on Windows. Most do not (or cannot) use the command line stuff required for any Linux. It's great for enthusiasts, but for common people, Windows is the default. That said, I've been using Amahi on Ubuntu, and while harder to set up than WHS, it is a viable replacement. Works very well, in fact

A Synology or Qnap box is a much better choice than Windows for those who lack the knowledge or desire to go the Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD diy route.
 
A Synology or Qnap box is a much better choice than Windows for those who lack the knowledge or desire to go the Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD diy route.

also about twice as expensive if not more than building a windows box
 
There's one massive reason I stick with NTFS over say ZFS for data storage: recoverability. Putting the issue of backups aside, if an NTFS formatted hardware raid/software raid/single disk/whatever goes bad or corrupt you simply have more options to scan for and recover files or virtually recreate a failed raidset with tools like R-Studio and then fish any good data off. There are many scenarios this comes in handy even if you're keeping recent backups. You simply have more control over your data.

And AFAIK there are no generally available scanning tools to fish files off a dead/corrupted/diminished ZFS pool that's decided not to mount anymore - so you have a scenario where otherwise perfectly good data is sitting there unreachable, stuck behind an abstraction layer. I have seen it done once before, but it was a one-off recovery on a corrupted pool that wouldn't mount anymore, required custom coding and was extremely complex. Granted ZFS's data integrity features might be more compelling to many people over data recoverability, but its something to consider. I have the feeling though that a lot of home user running ZFS to store their movies & music do not have backups and are relying on ZFS to mitigate the need for backups (in their minds), and the point is they'll simply have less options if a pool stops mounting one day.

One interesting development is the author of Flexraid has been working on a new piece of software "NZFS" which he claims will be bring ZFS-like features to NTFS.
 
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Nice. Was aware of UFS Explorer but didn't realize they added ZFS simple volume support. Then again how many people that are running ZFS aren't also leveraging raidz/raidz2/raidz3. But hopefully the tools will continue to evolve.
 
Yes, it is a nice step they added support to recover ZFS pools, but the next step is mirrors and raidz1/2/3.
 
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There's one massive reason I stick with NTFS over say ZFS for data storage: recoverability. Putting the issue of backups aside, if an NTFS formatted hardware raid/software raid/single disk/whatever goes bad or corrupt you simply have more options to scan for and recover files or virtually recreate a failed raidset with tools like R-Studio and then fish any good data off. There are many scenarios this comes in handy even if you're keeping recent backups. You simply have more control over your data.

If you are following best business practices you don't need to rely on third party tools for recovery. If you are in the above scenario you've done something wrong a long time ago. Now that's not to say crap doesn't happen. However, let's say that z3 wasn't an option and you only had z2/R6. To get yourself into this predicament this would mean there's no hot spare, you aren't doing snapshots of any kind, there's no disc-to-disc intermediary/failover, there's no backup system in place, and three discs up and died almost immediately while you were unaware.

Now that's assuming you only had one filesystem that wasn't pooled in anyway. Pooled it could take upwards of 6 discs or more to fail in a 4U. That's a lot of user error going on to require recovery of a raid set. In addition I'll bet dollars to donuts that the main reason the third party tool is necessary in the first place is because of the weak storage options in Windows to begin with.

For home use and some small business needs I think one can easily get away with using Windows as a basis for storage. However, outside of that it just doesn't compare to ZFS, Linux (and all of the file systems it supports), and NetApp. It's just not even in the ballpark.
 
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If you are serious with your data, then you have a backup. Then you dont need to recover from ZFS disks. All serious companies have backups. In that case, the strong protection ZFS gives weighs more than recoverability.
 
If you are serious with your data, then you have a backup. Then you dont need to recover from ZFS disks. All serious companies have backups. In that case, the strong protection ZFS gives weighs more than recoverability.

Depends what your RPO / RTO is for your dataset but I do tend to agree. I would point out that a backup is typically once every 24 hours but I assume ZFS has some sort of snapshooting technology - cant be arsed to look now :)
 
I thought this thread was going to be mostly about WIndows 8 Storage Spaces but instead it seems to be a thread about ZFS

would be nice if some one who uses WIndows 8 Storage Spaces would drop a post or 2 about it :) we have enough ZFS threads
 
If you are following best business practices you don't need to rely on third party tools for recovery. If you are in the above scenario you've done something wrong a long time ago. Now that's not to say crap doesn't happen. However, let's say that z3 wasn't an option and you only had z2/R6. To get yourself into this predicament this would mean there's no hot spare, you aren't doing snapshots of any kind, there's no disc-to-disc intermediary/failover, there's no backup system in place, and three discs up and died almost immediately while you were unaware.

That's kind of stating the obvious but to argue "you shouldn't need recovery" misses the point. It's simply one check in the plus column for NTFS. And we're not talking about business storage, most people on here are trying to weigh their home storage options. Anyone with half a brain isn't giving free business IT advice on a forum, and anyone looking for it is working in the wrong department. Fact of the matter is there are scenarios that exist which can manage to slip through every safeguard and not necessarily remedied by the last backup or snapshot and can come down needing to deal with raw data on the disks. Sure its rare but it exists and in those times you're glad that another level of recovery flexibility exists.

Have dealt with hundreds of situations over the years where I'm approached by clients or end users with recovery predicaments like let's say a set of disks from a broken raid, and for whatever complicated reason the backup - even though one existed - wasn't an option, and where I had no control over the conditions that led to their predicament, had it been ZFS any of those times they would've been SOL as their data would've been stuck in jail behind the abstraction layer. And yelling at them about what they should or shouldn't have done to avoid the predicament wouldn't have done anything to fix the situation.

I personally think ZFS is great but it simply isn't the one-filesystem-for-all that the more hardcore fans would like everyone to believe. In the context of this forum there are casual lurkers that can get into trouble by buying into the hype of any system whether it be hardware raid, ZFS, software raid or whatever - and not also hearing about downsides or pitfalls can lead to frustration later on. And let's face it a lot of people aren't going to bother with backups even after reading 100x that raid or zfs isn't a replacement.

Try to stay objective, learn about the strengths and weaknesses of everything. And even Windows Storage Spaces will - eventually, whether by RTM or SP1/SP2 - have strengths of some sort maybe even unseen right now but possibly worth considering. One man's opinion.
 
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I thought this thread was going to be mostly about WIndows 8 Storage Spaces but instead it seems to be a thread about ZFS

would be nice if some one who uses WIndows 8 Storage Spaces would drop a post or 2 about it :) we have enough ZFS threads
I thought the conclusion was to stay away from Win8 Storage Spaces?



That's kind of stating the obvious but to argue "you shouldn't need recovery" misses the point. It's simply one check in the plus column for NTFS.
I dont understand this. I thought hardware raid cards had their own filesystem? And NTFS runs on top of it? And if your hw raid cards thrashes your raid then you are smoked because it is proprietary filesystem. But now you are saying that NTFS has recovery tools, so you are not smoked?

I dont understand this. Can NTFS recovery tools repair thrashed raids too?
 
I thought this thread was going to be mostly about WIndows 8 Storage Spaces but instead it seems to be a thread about ZFS

would be nice if some one who uses WIndows 8 Storage Spaces would drop a post or 2 about it :) we have enough ZFS threads

Every thread here turns into a thread about ZFS. :(

Grandma needs something to store pictures of her knitting projects... Solution: ZFS!!!
 
That's kind of stating the obvious but to argue "you shouldn't need recovery" misses the point. It's simply one check in the plus column for NTFS. And we're not talking about business storage, most people on here are trying to weigh their home storage options.

I don't think missed the point for the following reasons:

A) RAID is hardly a "consumer" feature.
B) HW Raid Controllers have recovery tools... tons of them.
C) Software Raid Recovery isn't exclusive to Windows. Linux has it built in while offering Raid 0,1,4,5,6, and 10.

In reality we are comparing LDM vs the volume managers of other systems. However, if you are really going to try and put up Disk Management against that which can be found in either Raid HBA's, MDADM/Linux, and yes even ZFS/Unix I think you really need to add some more situations to your repertoire.

I'm really not buying the "we are talking about home use" because you provided me with an enterprise example.

That being said your argument is that when your raid collection fails in a Windows software setting (largely because it doesn't offer the plethora of raid levels other options offer) you can feel safe because you can pay for some third party tool to try and recover your raid array after not having backup of any kind. It's a very weak argument. It's been said so many times that raid is not backup. For anyone (home or enterprise) not to heed that warning really deserves to be in the perdicament. Nor is it "a plus" to find your self there.

Try to stay objective, learn about the strengths and weaknesses of everything. And even Windows Storage Spaces will - eventually, whether by RTM or SP1/SP2 - have strengths of some sort maybe even unseen right now but possibly worth considering. One man's opinion.

Um I'm no ZFS zealot. I believe in the proper tool for the proper setting. For home use LDM/Windows is merely OK, but it's far and away from being the best to what is out there. There's no doubt that Windows Storage Spaces brings enterprise level features down to the consumer level. However, it's no where near new. Nor should we pretend that it is. If we really wanted to give a plus to Windows we can say that it makes setup easier than many if not all other solutions, but the benefit more or less stops there.
 
Every thread here turns into a thread about ZFS. :(

Grandma needs something to store pictures of her knitting projects... Solution: ZFS!!!
So true. Grandma needs no less than 3 redundant and separately geolocated RAID-Z3 arrays or she is just wasting time.
 
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