Windows Storage Space compatible PCIe RAID Controllers?

Cylon Muffins · January 23, 2017

According to Microsoft, when using RAID controllers with Storage Spaces...

Quote

RAID adapters, if used, must have all RAID functionality disabled and must not obscure any attached devices

I'm in the market for my first PCIe RAID controller. Is every controller capable of running in this 'straight through' mode for Storage Spaces, or only certain ones? What do I need to look for?

Also, how exactly does parity mode work in Storage Spaces? Is it equivalent to RAID 5? I've been searching for a calculator to see how much space I would have available for a given level of redundancy and n number of drives, but no luck.

My plan is to run 11x 2TB HDD in parity mode through storage spaces, 'cause 11 points of failure makes life more exciting.

_{Before someone asks "WTH do you need so much storage for!?", I'm trying to clean up the internet by getting rid of porn, so obviously I need to download all of it, ok? Seriously though I shoot video and have a huge Steam library of games I never play.}

leadeater · January 24, 2017

For storage spaces you actually want an HBA, RAID controllers can be flashed with HBA firmware or much newer ones support HBA mode.

There's tons of IBM M1015 cards on ebay pre-flashed to IT mode (HBA). You can also look for LSI 9207/9211 HBA cards, or OEM cards based on these.

Storage Spaces parity depends on OS version.

Server 2012 R2:

Single Parity: N-1
Dual Parity: N-2

Server 2016

Single Parity: N-1
Dual Parity: Erasure Coding

You want Server 2016 if you need dual parity since it's way better. Also DO NOT use parity without SSD journal disks if you care at all about performance. If your going to use Server 2016 you can use the SSDs in a tiered configuration utilizing Multi-Resilient Virtual Disks.

Server 2012 R2 also does not support re-balancing data when new disks are added, Server 2016 does.

Edit:

If usable storage isn't a huge concern and your prepared to expand the storage pool you can also use two-way mirror configuration. This isn't RAID 1 it's mirroring at the data level across as many disks as you like, at 50% usable capacity hit obviously. Advantage of mirror configurations is they don't suffer from the write performance hit that parity does and don't inherently need SSDs in the system.

Cylon Muffins · January 25, 2017

Thanks so much, @leadeater. I've been fastidiously working through your answer and Googling everything I didn't understand... like HBAs, man they're relatively cheap on eBay eh.

I'm running Windows 10 Pro. This is on my personal rig, not some fancy enterprise gear Write performance is not a big deal for me, I guess my priorities are...

Cost - Like anyone, budget is limited. I can't go out and buy 24 NVMe drives.
Resiliency - If my data isn't safe, the whole exercise is pointless. I've lost all my data so many times due to no / inadequate backups over the years... I ain't letting it get me again!
Read speed - Some people love getting 500 fps at 4K or pwning noobs, I love blazing fast high capacity storage. It makes me happy.

Current situation

Storage is currently taken care of by:

480GB SSD system volume
5x 2TB HDD in storage space simple pool

Backing up to 4-bay NAS with 3x 3TB HDD in JBOD with robocopy running as a daily scheduled task.

My rig has the following potential for upgradability:

0x SATA ports free
1x PCIe slot free
5x 3.5" HDD slots free
3x 2.5" HDD slots free

Current Problem

Space isn't an issue just yet - probably will be sometime in the second half of the year it will be though.

Restoring backup from NAS is my main issue right now. Every time a drive fails (I think I've had 3 or 4 in the past 2 years, not to mention 2 SSDs... _{the gods hate me}) it takes 1 week+ to restore from the NAS. My fear is having only a single copy of my data for over a week while smashing the HDDs 24/7 to restore.

_{As a side note, I've tried to look into why the restore is so slow... my only hypothesis is the NAS has some slow ass hardware running it. It gets nowhere near saturating a 100mbit link, let alone gigabit. Even when I tried it in RAID 0 for fun performance was virtually identical.}

My Short Term Plan

I need some kind of redundancy on my rig to stem my anxiety about data loss during the incredibly slow restore process. For me, that means adding 8 more SATA ports with a HBA card, and chucking in another 2 or 3 HDDs and switching over to parity storage space. If you reccomend some SSDs in tiered storage, that is also doable medium term I suppose.

Questions

Is there someone I can read up more on storage spaces? Everything I find on google is super basic. I can find tons of detailed information on RAID levels, RAID speed / capacity calculators, but when it comes to storage spaces I've really been lucking out.
Failing the question 1, is there any problem (e.g. performance) with using mismatched drive sizes? The $/GB of 3TB is a lot more attractive now than when I first bought my set of five 2TB drives.
Also from question 1, is there a storage space calculator anywhere? How many drives will I need to add to make the switch to parity and maintain the current size of ~9TB?
If I go the tiered storage route, what sure I be targeting with the SSDs? As much space as I can afford, or..? How many? Just max it out with 3?
Can I switch to parity 'live' from simple, or do I need to delete the current pool and build a new one?

Storage spaces is kind of a pain... I feel like I could answer many of these questions myself just by playing around with it, but without having blank media to feed it, all the options are locked out. Perhaps I'll set up a VM a dozen 1GB virtual drives to play around with or something.

leadeater · January 25, 2017

34 minutes ago, Cylon Muffins said:

My Short Term Plan

I need some kind of redundancy on my rig to stem my anxiety about data loss during the incredibly slow restore process. For me, that means adding 8 more SATA ports with a HBA card, and chucking in another 2 or 3 HDDs and switching over to parity storage space. If you reccomend some SSDs in tiered storage, that is also doable medium term I suppose.

Questions

Is there someone I can read up more on storage spaces? Everything I find on google is super basic. I can find tons of detailed information on RAID levels, RAID speed / capacity calculators, but when it comes to storage spaces I've really been lucking out.

Failing the question 1, is there any problem (e.g. performance) with using mismatched drive sizes? The $/GB of 3TB is a lot more attractive now than when I first bought my set of five 2TB drives.

Also from question 1, is there a storage space calculator anywhere? How many drives will I need to add to make the switch to parity and maintain the current size of ~9TB?

If I go the tiered storage route, what sure I be targeting with the SSDs? As much space as I can afford, or..? How many? Just max it out with 3?

Can I switch to parity 'live' from simple, or do I need to delete the current pool and build a new one?

Storage spaces is kind of a pain... I feel like I could answer many of these questions myself just by playing around with it, but without having blank media to feed it, all the options are locked out. Perhaps I'll set up a VM a dozen 1GB virtual drives to play around with or something.

Just as a side note you can get cheap used server SSDs on ebay to use as journal disks. Something to look in to if your not happy with the write speed.

Storage Spaces is very new and evolving quickly so sort of the nature of the beast. Some information is now incorrect/obsolete but that is more of an issue with Windows Server than desktop, since that hasn't really changed in features etc.
No that is one of the great things about Storage Spaces, you can mix disk sizes. Don't go too extreme on the size difference since that can limit the size of a single virtual disk even if there are multiple other disks in the pool with plenty of free space.
Use the same calculations as RAID, effective/usable space calculation is the same.
Not an option, feature only in Windows Server
Nope, but conditional. A storage pool is a collection of disks, inside that pool you can create multiple virtual disks. The virtual disk is where you define the resiliency type, which you cannot change. What you can do is make sure you use thin provisioning when you create a virtual disk so it actually only uses the space of the real data size, then if you want to change the resiliency type you can create a new virtual disk and copy the data to the new one and delete the old. You need enough space in the pool for both virtual disks with the data, thin provisioned disks don't shrink in size they only grow as needed.

If you want to do some testing with storage spaces open disk manager and create 4 or 5 10GB-50GB virtual disk files, vhdx. Then use these virtual disks to create a storage pool and do what ever you want no risk . If for some reason that doesn't work do it with a VM, that I have done recently.