Storage space dual parity upgrade help

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KarlFranz

New Member
Mar 18, 2019
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Hi.

I currently have a 15x drives pool in windows server 2016. 2x 6tb. 11x 3tb. 2x 2tb. Currently run out of space and planning buy some new drives.

I planned buy 3x 8tb wd red drives.

But currently I have bad read/write performance.

Having some advice for me to rise the performance of my pool?

Upgrade to windows server 2019?
Create a new pool with some specific config?
Use ReFS?
Change OS?
Buy NVME drive cache?

I want security like RAID6, easy to add drive to pool and better performance.

Currently ~10-50MBps read speed.

The main purpose of my server is for Plex. So 50MBps is not so good when many transcode at same time.

The rest of my specs.

2x opteron 12cores
16GB ram
2x Gbits network
1x asus spike raid controller
1x hba sas2 8port controller.
With a tiny 120GB SSD os drive.

Thank you for advice.
 

Bert

Well-Known Member
Mar 31, 2018
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Is it possible for you to create a new storage spaces array with these new drives to find the optimal configuration? You must get very high throughput if you choose simple configuration with multiple columns. If not you can delve into identifying the limiting component like the raid card.
 

gregsachs

Active Member
Aug 14, 2018
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How are the drives connected? 8 to the sas controller and 7 on the asus?
I see you have an 8 port SAS HBA, how are the other drives connected? Any SATA port multiplier? I'm not familiar with the ASUS raid controller.
I run storage spaces with dual parity, 12x 2tb 7.2k rpm sas drives on a LSI 9285 and I can easily do 350MB/s reading using crystaldiskmark from a vm on the H-V host.
Space is ReFS, dual parity.
 

gregsachs

Active Member
Aug 14, 2018
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As bert suggested, I'd try doing some quick testing with other layouts-do a simple virtual drive with ~8 columns, and a mirror with 6. Check performance.
new-virtualdisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName namehere -FriendlyName simpletest -ResiliencySettingName simple -Size 50GB -ProvisioningType Thin -NumberOfColumns 8
 

KarlFranz

New Member
Mar 18, 2019
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number of columns... a concept I have difficulty to understand.
And I didn't see it in the GUI version of Storage Space.

Can I display the specs (like number of columns) of my actual drive with a Powershell command ?
 

gregsachs

Active Member
Aug 14, 2018
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Get-VirtualDisk | ft FriendlyName, ResiliencySettingName, NumberOfColumns, NumberOfDataCopies
Columns are roughly explained as how many disks the data is spread out over-for dual parity it must be at least 7.
So a simple space with 8 columns would write the interleave value(default 256kb) to disk 1, then 2, then 3, then 4, etc. If mirrored or parity it gets a little more complicated in terms of data distribution, there are some good white papers.
 

KarlFranz

New Member
Mar 18, 2019
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FriendlyName ResiliencySettingName NumberOfColumns NumberOfDataCopies
------------ --------------------- --------------- ------------------
Music Parity 5 1
ServerData Parity 5 1
Series Parity 5 1
Backup Parity 5 1
RetroGames Parity 5 1
Games Parity 5 1
Family Parity 11 1
Movies Parity 5 1
Applications Parity 5 1

So some drive only have 5 columns, so data spread over only 5 of my 15 disk, right?

Its the Movies and Series my huge 12TB and 18TB drives at ~~40MB/s.
 

cesmith9999

Well-Known Member
Mar 26, 2013
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So some drive only have 5 columns, so data spread over only 5 of my 15 disk, right?
That is not how that works. and how it works is different if you have fixed provisioning and thin provisioning.

The VDisks will use all of the disks in the pool.

Chris
 

gregsachs

Active Member
Aug 14, 2018
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Hmmm. I don't have an answer on the slow reads. Writes are expected to be slow in parity, but reads should not be.
This is a good explanation on columns:
Storage Spaces Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) - TechNet Articles - United States (English) - TechNet Wiki
A couple notes, as well:
1: The only place you may have dual parity is the family space; 5 columns does not give dual parity. run the get-virtualdisk command and add physicaldiskredundancy at the end, it will likely say '1' for all the spaces except family.
2: With the family space is the 11 columns will give you issues if the 2x 2tb drives fill up, it may refuse to write any more to that space.
Like I said, I'd try and create a simple space with 5 columns first, and test read performance. Then try a mirrored space, same thing. It is also possible you are ram limited-16gb feels light.
 

ari2asem

Active Member
Dec 26, 2018
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The Netherlands, Groningen
I read a lot.

For now. I think switch to Drivepool + Snapraid.

Good idea?
yes, keep it simple.
disadvantage of snapraid: snapshot parity/protection, this can be automaized wth some helper-scripts and task schedueling in windows.

big advantage: parity up 6 drives and use any size of hdd in any condition (with or without existing data on it)

i love snapraid -:)
 
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