R2 Storage Spaces (SSD Caching) or HW RAID

[Radian]

What's the verdict on the new features of Storage Spaces/pools in R2? I'm using a LSI9260i controller currently to handle a 6TB RAID6 array (WD enterprise disks), and a SSD RAID1 Mirror as a boot disk (8 disks total). I have several small SSD's that I would like to find a use for, so does it make sense to migrate the 6TB RAID6 into a W2K12R2 storage pool and stick in the spare SSD's? I know I can do this of the controller, but it does require an extra license and seems to be very particular about what SSD's can be used.

I've not had any issue with the LSI and I'm a believer that HW always beats software based RAID, so I just want to understand the target market MS are aiming this kind of storage at?

 

[Fzdog2]

Technically, if you listen to Microsoft, they are targeting everything from home NAS to enterprise SAN with their SMB3 protocol and storage clustering.

But in my first usage of a parity storage spaces, it sucks. Their implementation of adding any size disk to a parity pool is the same as RAID rules, all disks are only as big as the smallest disk.
And the write speed was very low. My 5 disk parity drive would write at 1gb speed to RAM, but when that was full, it would slow to about 15MB/s.

I'm hoping R2 at least fixes 1 of these problems.

 

[Salami]

I haven't used Storage Spaces but I have had a MSDN subscription for 15 years so I have used a lot of Microsoft technology, and I can tell you they rarely if ever get anything right until at least the 3rd version of it.

 

[Radian]

Sounds like I'll stick with Hardware RAID for now then, but I did like the idea of the shared storage pools, you can use it for clustering rather than needing a SAN. I might run a parallel setup and see how they compare.