Windows Server 2019 Storage Spaces

[OrlyP]

Hi all. I've been a lurker for some time now and just decided to post for the first time.

I plan to rebuild my current home server which hosts Plex and some other services. Currently, I have a bunch of drives pooled together using Drive Bender with very minimal fault tolerance (just folder duplication). The company has went under so I'm planning to move to SS for a bit of future-proofing. Currently, I have eight (8) mechanical HDDs of varying capacities for media storage. The system and other standalone drives are not included.

Being an absolute noob to SS, I have a few questions:

1. I made the following table. Does this configuration reflect my correct understanding of how I can utilize all of the drives in SS?


2. Say, if I add two (2) more 16TB drives, bringing the drive count to 10, can I just allocate the new capacity to vDisk1, vDisk2, and vDisk3 while retaining the fault tolerance type and without destroying any volumes in it?

Those are my big questions for now. Thanks to anyone who would help me make sense of it all.

Cheers!

 

[fad]

You can't share disks across different protection types. However you can have a few vdisks on the same type.

Parity is a bad idea on SS, unless you add cache ssds. I gave up on parity and use mirror for all my drives, and still have cache ssds.

 

[cesmith9999]

if you do use a mirror config, make sure that your columncount is set to 2. otherwise you will not know why you do not have all of your space

Chris

 

[OrlyP]

Very much appreciate the replies.

Sorry for the late revert but I've been a little busy messing with SS. I'm using six small drives in an assortment of sizes (250, 320, and 500GB) on a test machine so I can get a better understanding of things.

Still trying to wrap my head around the concept of columns. The only relationship I can form is that the column count is also the number of physical drives I'll need to add to an existing Storage Pool to make practical use of the added capacity. I derived this from the fact that I needed to add 3 drives to the existing pool before I was able to expand the vDisk volume. I mean, I can add 1 or 2 disks and see the pool size get bigger (and probably create another vDisk to make use of it) but it was only after adding the 3rd drive was I able to expand the existing vDisk volume.

 

[cesmith9999]

Yes, column count is the number of drives you can add at a time for expansion.

Chris

 

[nasomi]

I know a lot of people shit on storage spaces parity array. But I have some experience.

I have 14x4tb ssd's in 2x 7 disk parity array's. One is Hardware raid5 on an H810 raid card, one is windows storage spaces. I get ~400MB/sec read/write which is sufficient for me. The arrays are 8 years old. I've had 2 drive failures, and both rebuilt successfully, one on each. The rebuild took ~2 days each.

I have 24x480gb ssd's in 4x 6disk parity array's. Two are hardware raid5 on an h810 raid card, two are windows storage spaces. I get about 1600MB/sec read and i forget the write, but it's plenty for my use case. I have had zero failures on these disks. They are also 8 years old.

As we speak, I'm getting ready to retire the entire setup. I'm moving to 4x2tb NVME's and 3x20tb HDD's. With the new setup, I have no raid card, so I'll be relying entirely on storage spaces. It hasn't let me down yet. Raid is not a substitute for backup, all critical data is always backed up via multiple mediums.

 

[cryptojean]

Have you considered Snapraid?