storage spaces on windows 8

Goliath002 · June 9, 2013

I just have one question, Storage Spaces on windows 8 only works as a RAID solution for your PC?¡??

or also works for home server? can you manage your data on the NET? like windows home server

Goliath002 · June 10, 2013

anyone?

dalekphalm · June 12, 2013

Storage Spaces on Windows 8 functions similarly to RAID, and you could think of as a form of Software RAID.

Can you manage your data on the net? Well sure, if you have the necessary software setup (Remote access, remote streaming, etc).

Storage Spaces is only available on Windows 8, and Windows Server 2012 (Incl. Essentials 2012). It is not available on any of the Windows Home Server products.

Just a heads-up: The parity based Storage Spaces pools have REALLY SLOW write speeds. The read speeds are alright, but the write speeds are just down-right ridiculous (Unless this has changed in the last couple months?). I personally advise against using Storage Spaces, because there seem to be a large number of bugs that need to be worked out.

I tried Storage Spaces w/ Server 2012 Essentials on my personal home server and encountered two issues:

1) The aforementioned terrible write speeds

2) A bug where Storage Spaces would not release free space from deleted files. So essentially what happened is eventually my storage array kept crashing because it was "filled up", even though the file usage was low (About 1.5TB unused), but because of file deletes where that space wasn't freed up, the array fooled itself into thinking it was full. This bug was unfixable on my system, and I eventually abandoned that platform.

I recommend looking at alternatives to Storage Spaces: Specifically, you should look at FlexRAID. It's stable (I've been using it for like 4 months now with no issues), and is multi-platform. It runs on anything Windows, and most major Linux distro's. It has parity RAID-like redundancy, with unlimited potential parity drives. It also has drive pooling (With or without parity), and you can use parity with Mismatched drive sizes. I currently have 2x3TB, 1x2TB, and 2x500GB drives in my FlexRAID array.

Other alternatives include Linux Software RAID, ZFS Raidz, SnapRAID (Parity only solution - their drive pooling function is super basic), StableBit DrivePool (Like Drive Extender from WHS v1), and many others.

Of course there's hardware RAID, and integrated Onboard motherboard RAID as well. Onboard RAID should not be used in a media or file server, unless you just want to use RAID 1.