Is there a Synology Hybrid RAID/SHR-type storage solution for Windows?

[OrlyP]

I currently have Drive Bender with 43TB of pooled capacity:

4x 8TB
2x 4TB
1x 3TB

Drive Bender has been great, been using it for maybe about a decade now with little to no problems. However, the developer has closed shop and so, I'm essentially running my system on borrowed time. I'll be stuck if, for example, a Windows update component breaks it in the future. This gave me some motivation to try other storage solutions.

My only condition is that, I want to retain the current server and its OS, Windows Server 2019. It currently runs a bunch of things, not the least of which is Plex, UniFi Network Application, Hyper-V, Veeam Backup, a few others, and of course, Drive Bender. Suffice to say, the hard disks above are all housed within the same server chassis. I am a Windows guy through and through. I can maybe follow Linux CLI scripts and whatnots to spin up things, which is the easy part, but troubleshooting it later is a whole new galaxy for me and something I don't think I can confidently do on my own.

Anywho, I was looking at Storage Spaces to keep it native and 'simple'. I was enticed by the features of ReFS and parity modes to afford a bit of storage resiliency. But it seems that you're locked-in to the disk columns at setup. Meaning, if I need to expand the pool, I'll need the same number of drives as the existing column.

The Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) is something I think would fit my needs. SHR-1 or 2 allows you to add drives willy-nilly to the pool and it will automatically rebuild as needed and without data loss. You will still need to plan on the particular drive size to add so as to reduce or eliminate wasted space, but that's about it. Though obviously, I am not interested in a Synology NAS. I was able to setup an XPEnology box a long time ago to play around with.

So, any such SHR-like solution in Windows? Or am I trying to have my cake and eat it too?

 

[louie1961]

Synology uses a number of different technologies: BTRFS (file system), device mapper, logical volume manager (LVM) as well as MDADM (software raid) which all come as built in to the Linux kernel. SHR works by breaking up your hard drive into smaller equal size logical drives that it can then sling together as a raid array. It does not rely on the raid function of BTRFS which has some issues currently:

What is the RAID implementation for Btrfs File System on Synology NAS? - Synology Knowledge Center

Synology Knowledge Center offers comprehensive support, providing answers to frequently asked questions, troubleshooting steps, software tutorials, and all the technical documentation you may need.

kb.synology.com

That being said, there do seem to be Windows equivalents for some of these technologies: storage spaces, dynamic disks. I am not sure if anyone has tied these together the way Synology does it in Linux. I am not much of a Windows person. I hope that helps.

 

[nabsltd]

My only condition is that, I want to retain the current server and its OS, Windows Server 2019. It currently runs a bunch of things, not the least of which is Plex, UniFi Network Application, Hyper-V, Veeam Backup, a few others, and of course, Drive Bender.

I have a Windows 2012 R2 server that is similar (although not quite as much disk space). What I'm doing right now is moving every application that doesn't need direct access to those large disks onto a smaller box (Beelink DER5 with Ryzen 5 5560U). With 16GB RAM and 512GB of NVMe SSD as delivered (with room for a 2.5" SATA SSD), it's fine for running things like light virtualization, etc. The CPU is good enough for things like transcoding for Plex. But, there's much more capable versions (all the way up to Ryzen 7 7840HS)...the one I bought was only $250, and it's all I need. It's running Windows Server 2022.

If you did something like this, you could move a lot of software off the "storage" server, then figure out how you want to use the storage in the long-term without having to worry so much about bringing down other services.