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Windows Storage Spaces - ReFS

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demechman

Weaksauce
Joined
May 19, 2005
Messages
126
Has anyone used storage spaces in a HTPC/Media server environment? I am curious on the ability to stream videos and other content to a television. I assume it is fast enough to keep up with a high resolution video but wanted to see what everyone's experiences have been.

Reading up on the technology it seems like a perfect low cost low power solution I am looking for but could not find reliable information on the abilities necessary for a home theater setup.
 
The problem with storage spaces is you really need to do a raid-10 setup with it if you want good read and write speeds. The parity storage spaces has horrid write speeds.

For my media server I have 5x 3TB drives, I use 1 for snapraid parity and use stablebit drivepool to provide the pooling functions.
 
The biggest issue with storage spaces, is that you really need to plan it out and understand what you are getting into. It's not as simple as adding a disk at a time to a big pool. You need to plan out the number of disks, whether you buy them all up front or not, how many it will take to expand and performance requirements. For a media server, writes really don't matter much other than the initial load, which you hopefully do once, and forget about it. But considering drive sizes, I opted to mirror two 4TB drives just to start things out. It only takes two more drives each time to expand, and crashplan backups give me the recovery I need to make up for multi drive failure, which isn't that likely anyways. By the time I get to maxing out the 8 drive hot swap capacity in my case, I am hoping double parity Spaces will be supported with ReFS, at which point I will switch to that and add a couple SSDs for write back caching if I see the need for write speed.

Jake
 
And more to the performance, I stream three 720p movies and one 1080p high bitrate movie at the same time with no issues. The network and drives will not be a bottleneck for video these days. Even raw bluray rips barely touch a 1GbE connection on playback. This is on a mirrored pair of WD Green drives formatted ReFS. Playback is through Plex Media Server to a Samsung TV with native plex app.

Jake
 
You know, I can't find an answer to a question about Storage Spaces, do any of you know?

Is it possible to increase the capacity of a storage pool by replacing all of the drives with larger drives?

I see it's possible to increase the space by adding MORE drives but nothing that suggests you can increase it on existing disks. Like if you have 2x 1TB drives in a simple mirror you'd have 1TB of storage and then you replaced both of those with 2TB drives one at a time, can you expand the disk to 2TB of storage?

I would imagine it's possible but Google is failing me.
 
Great feedback and comforting to know that the plex setup works. I am considering a very similar configuration.

I am settling on 6x 4TB WD Green drives for the pool. I am not sure if I am interested in backups since I do have a other boxes designed to handle my family pictures and other things I would never want to lose.

So if I read the comments correctly I should be fine to stream videos and I should carefully think about the configuration of the pool. I don't think I will be monkeying around with the sizes after I get all the components purchased or setup.
 
So, your main concern will be the number of drives you are comfortable purchasing at each expansion time. Minimums are: 2 drives with single copy mirror, 3 drives with single parity and 5 with double parity. The you will also want to consider the number of drives in a single chassis. This all assumes you want one large pool of drives. You could simply create a new pool each time and manage them separately as a single aggregate in each pool. Plex allows you to then aggregate multiple folders (and network shares) into a single library.

My intention is to max out a single chassis of eight disks, then when more is needed I can simply add another server/chassis. Then using plex, aggregate them into a single logical view. Works great for media and will have the added bonus of more processing power for other endeavors (virtual lab, video encoding, etc)

Jake
 
On the backup side, I use Crashplan to backup all my other devices to my main server, then license it to backup to the cloud. It backs up itself as well as the other computer's backups, so it's all inclusive and a single point of management. You can monitor all of the backs for all the computers from a single GUI. Pretty nice, and it's unlimited to the cloud for less the $6 a month if you buy in advance.

Jake
 
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