Storage Spaces with SSD Cache Help

[KPragnell]

Afternoon guys, long time lurker, first time poster.

 

I have 4 desktop machines at home and used to use two mirrored 4tb drives on my main pc as data back up. The drives were set up in storage spaces on Win 10 and I had no real issues until I ran out of room.

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I've recently purchased some more 3TB drives (to add to my unused ones) giving me 6 in total. I have put into a new build which is running server 2016. Since reading that an SSD cache cannot be added down the line I've decided to buy x2 240gb ssds to add to the build.

 

My goal is to have the SSDs mirrored for cache with the 6 HDDs set up with parity 2 so that I have a decent amount of protection against recovery. (I've since learned windows requires 7 drives for redundancy 2 so I may have to buy another) I want two drive recovery as I had one 4tb fail in the past and it was too stressful whether the other disk would then fail too although I know logically the chance is very small.

 

I've since tried using the Storage Spaces GUI to set up a pool including tiering before trying to set up the virtual disks but I keep running in to errors and other issues. People who I've spoken to have suggested using Powershell to achieve this but I'm not too well up on this and wondered if anyone had advise for me. I created the pool without the SSDs and the performance was really poor - I was only just getting about 15MB/s of sustained writes, is there a fix for this?

 

Sorry for all of the Noobish questions but help would be greatly appreciated.