I'm debating whether I should make the move to hardware RAID or keep using the built-in "Storage Pools" solution in Windows Server 2012 R2 on my home-server.
I've been running Windows Server 2012 R2 with a parity (1-drive parity) solution consisting of 8x Western Digital RE4 2TB + 2x Western Digital Black Edition 2TB for quite some time and it has been working decently enough.
I decided to give ReFS a go and have been using it with a single virtual disk making use of all the space. It's mostly used for hosting my library of Blu-Ray rips (20-40GB MKV's), music library, audio-book library and various software and driver installers and Windows Backup from our various Windows systems.
The read speeds have been good, here we are mostly limited by the network interface (1Gbps) and even when trying to configure LACP from Windows Server 2012 R2 to my Cisco SG-300 switch it seems like we are still more or less bottlenecked by the 1Gbps interface so the link aggreggetion does not seem to do wonders.
Sadly it seems like the write speeds are rather poor. I have uTorrent configured to write directly to the ReFS virtual disk and do full pre-allocating and this will lag the entire software each and every time a new torrents starts. It's like the write speeds are too slow for uTorrent to actually function as it should. After the allocation of a new torrent is done thing seems to be working again but I often run into various disk overload messages which I suspect is due to the actual write speeds dipping below the actual uTorrent throughput at times (11.5-12 MBps) which quite frankly is rather silly.
I have also noticed that heavy write traffic seems to cripple the virtual disk / storage pool, it almost seems like Windows Server 2012 R2 is having a hard time distrubiting the data between the disks crippling the performane.
Now I have ran into an issue where it seems like I don't have enough space on some of my disk for the storage pool to work.. And all the GUI is telling me is "Warning: In Service" like that tells me anything.. The perfomance is pretty much useless at this stage. All the data is still there, and it is accessible but trying to copy from or to the virtual disk it takes for ever. Getting like 1 GB of the virtual disk will littarly take me hours.
Doing a repair does not seem to work because of the lack of free space, it will get to 20% and then just drop back down to 10% and keep doing that with no end.
So I'm currently at a cross-road. I can add 1-2x Western Digital RE4 4TB drives and repair the pool and get some additional storage added to the virtual disk. Or I could stop using the IBM M1015 with LSI 9211-8i IT-firmware and move to hardware RAID using a IBM M5015 or some other RAID card + expander or keep using Storage Spaces / Storage Pools.
What do you recommend? I guess I would get more presistent and stable performance from Hardware RAID, especially in-terms of write speeds. But would additional cost be worth it?
How does a Storage Pool react if I add a new, larger hard drive (4TB compared to the existing 2TB ones?) will it bascially render 2TB useless? ShouId I be able repair the virtual disk if I add an additional drive? The GUI doesn't really tell you anything...
How does RAID-controllers like M5015 (9260/61) compare to M5110 (9265) and M5210 (9360) in-terms RAID-5 performance over 10-12 disks? Is M5110 or M5210 worth the additional cost? How easy is it to flash M5015 to 9260, M5110 to 9265 and M5210 to 9360? Just as easy as with M1015 to 9211 IT? Any potential drawbacks?
I've been running Windows Server 2012 R2 with a parity (1-drive parity) solution consisting of 8x Western Digital RE4 2TB + 2x Western Digital Black Edition 2TB for quite some time and it has been working decently enough.
I decided to give ReFS a go and have been using it with a single virtual disk making use of all the space. It's mostly used for hosting my library of Blu-Ray rips (20-40GB MKV's), music library, audio-book library and various software and driver installers and Windows Backup from our various Windows systems.
The read speeds have been good, here we are mostly limited by the network interface (1Gbps) and even when trying to configure LACP from Windows Server 2012 R2 to my Cisco SG-300 switch it seems like we are still more or less bottlenecked by the 1Gbps interface so the link aggreggetion does not seem to do wonders.
Sadly it seems like the write speeds are rather poor. I have uTorrent configured to write directly to the ReFS virtual disk and do full pre-allocating and this will lag the entire software each and every time a new torrents starts. It's like the write speeds are too slow for uTorrent to actually function as it should. After the allocation of a new torrent is done thing seems to be working again but I often run into various disk overload messages which I suspect is due to the actual write speeds dipping below the actual uTorrent throughput at times (11.5-12 MBps) which quite frankly is rather silly.
I have also noticed that heavy write traffic seems to cripple the virtual disk / storage pool, it almost seems like Windows Server 2012 R2 is having a hard time distrubiting the data between the disks crippling the performane.
Now I have ran into an issue where it seems like I don't have enough space on some of my disk for the storage pool to work.. And all the GUI is telling me is "Warning: In Service" like that tells me anything.. The perfomance is pretty much useless at this stage. All the data is still there, and it is accessible but trying to copy from or to the virtual disk it takes for ever. Getting like 1 GB of the virtual disk will littarly take me hours.
Doing a repair does not seem to work because of the lack of free space, it will get to 20% and then just drop back down to 10% and keep doing that with no end.
So I'm currently at a cross-road. I can add 1-2x Western Digital RE4 4TB drives and repair the pool and get some additional storage added to the virtual disk. Or I could stop using the IBM M1015 with LSI 9211-8i IT-firmware and move to hardware RAID using a IBM M5015 or some other RAID card + expander or keep using Storage Spaces / Storage Pools.
What do you recommend? I guess I would get more presistent and stable performance from Hardware RAID, especially in-terms of write speeds. But would additional cost be worth it?
How does a Storage Pool react if I add a new, larger hard drive (4TB compared to the existing 2TB ones?) will it bascially render 2TB useless? ShouId I be able repair the virtual disk if I add an additional drive? The GUI doesn't really tell you anything...
How does RAID-controllers like M5015 (9260/61) compare to M5110 (9265) and M5210 (9360) in-terms RAID-5 performance over 10-12 disks? Is M5110 or M5210 worth the additional cost? How easy is it to flash M5015 to 9260, M5110 to 9265 and M5210 to 9360? Just as easy as with M1015 to 9211 IT? Any potential drawbacks?