Storage Spaces VS onboard RAID (5)

[3pwood]

Hi guys, posted here once before and got some good feedback, original thread can be found here:

So to recap this is the hardware I'm working with:

 

Asus ROG Maximus X code,

seagate ST8000NE0004 Enterprise Nas hdd ( IronWolf Pro )*3

Samsung MZ-V6P1T0BW 1000Gb 960 Pro

 

So it was suggested to me to use software RAID rather than onboard hardware RAID so I haven't had much testing time but yesterday I played around with Windows 10 Storage Spaces and then with the motherboard onboard RAID and transfer rates obviously fluctuate but I feel I get better transfer rates using onboard RAID...or am I doing something wrong? Any advice or thoughts on this? Any pros and cons I need to consider regarding expanding the array or transferring it to another PC at a later stage? I'm not really too concerned about CPU utilization when writing because with an 8700K I don't feel it's a huge issue. Also the PC is more or less standalone so for the most part I'll be the only one writing to it though might be multiple devices reading from it once I populate the drives and setup Plex Media Server.

 

[Helly]

I have no experience with storage spaces but i know the onboard RAID is not really hardware RAID as it still uses ur 8700k and your ram. Real hardware RAID uses its own cpu/ram and especially for RAID5/6 a raid controller is much faster.

 

With regards to transferring to another pc later, using the onboard RAID you'd have to move it to a PC with the same chipset. Which is unlikely when you're upgrading. So you will lose the array when moving it to another PC, i don't know if storage spaces has this problem but a hardware controller does not. Reading from an array takes very little CPU, so reading from multiple devices should not be a problem. Your NIC will be a problem before your CPU will be. Writing to a RAID5 array is slower because the parity has to be calculated.

[3pwood]

Thank you for that, yeah I know about the parity so I know that's why it's slower...and I have an 8700K with 32GB RAM so hence not too concerned with RAID using up some of that when writing, thing is it's a media/archive server so I won't be writing to it all the time everyday and as I said I'll be the only one writing to the array at all so I'm ok with all this. The transfer to another rig will be an issue though but then again before I built this new PC my last one was built in 2009 so maybe I'll just cross that bridge when I get there as it's unlikely I'd want to use the same drives in a new rig anyway due to warranty concerns mainly.

 

[dalekphalm]

6 hours ago, 3pwood said:

Thank you for that, yeah I know about the parity so I know that's why it's slower...and I have an 8700K with 32GB RAM so hence not too concerned with RAID using up some of that when writing, thing is it's a media/archive server so I won't be writing to it all the time everyday and as I said I'll be the only one writing to the array at all so I'm ok with all this. The transfer to another rig will be an issue though but then again before I built this new PC my last one was built in 2009 so maybe I'll just cross that bridge when I get there as it's unlikely I'd want to use the same drives in a new rig anyway due to warranty concerns mainly.

 

Storage Spaces is somewhat notorious for having slower performance on RAID5/6 type parity setups. It's a pretty rock solid system, very robust now, but speed isn't necessarily that great.

[3pwood]

Yeah I'd read that it sucks BUT that again was people comparing it to proper RAID and not onboard RAID so just wanted to be sure I'm not doing something wrong.

[leadeater]

On 4/4/2018 at 11:55 AM, 3pwood said:

Yeah I'd read that it sucks BUT that again was people comparing it to proper RAID and not onboard RAID so just wanted to be sure I'm not doing something wrong.

If you are able to put an SSD in to the Storage Spaces pool set it to journal and it will cache writes just like write-back cache does on a hardware RAID controller. Though to be more correct even cheap hardware RAID controllers without write-back cache perform exactly the same as Storage Spaces does for parity writes.

[3pwood]

Nah, the SSD is my OS drive, the IronWolf Pro drives are gonna be for mass storage in RAID 5.

[leadeater]

10 hours ago, 3pwood said:

Nah, the SSD is my OS drive, the IronWolf Pro drives are gonna be for mass storage in RAID 5.

I mean add an extra SSD to the build for that purpose. Without write-back cache of some kind any parity RAID performance will suck, that's why motherboard RAID is so bad because you can't add any write-back cache.

 

Not saying you need to or should but it is an option if the write performance isn't good enough for your needs, Storage Spaces has the option to do so and onboard motherboard RAID doesn't.

[3pwood]

On 4/10/2018 at 9:38 AM, leadeater said:

I mean add an extra SSD to the build for that purpose. Without write-back cache of some kind any parity RAID performance will suck, that's why motherboard RAID is so bad because you can't add any write-back cache.

 

Not saying you need to or should but it is an option if the write performance isn't good enough for your needs, Storage Spaces has the option to do so and onboard motherboard RAID doesn't.

That is quite interesting and informative...SSDs are expensive in my li'l third world country though, think I'll have to live with write performance hit and enjoy the read performance. THAT being said a new bios was released for my board and I did some practical testing by copying movies across the network to the RAID array and I was getting 50-60+MB/s...I think I can live with that, only did 1 test for now though, wrote around 20-30GB to monitor transfer rate, need to test how it works with smaller files like pictures and documents, working with a 128k strip size as that seems to be the general consensus on the internet.

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, 3pwood said:

That is quite interesting and informative...SSDs are expensive in my li'l third world country though, think I'll have to live with write performance hit and enjoy the read performance. THAT being said a new bios was released for my board and I did some practical testing by copying movies across the network to the RAID array and I was getting 50-60+MB/s...I think I can live with that, only did 1 test for now though, wrote around 20-30GB to monitor transfer rate, need to test how it works with smaller files like pictures and documents, working with a 128k strip size as that seems to be the general consensus on the internet.

This is also a way to speed up Storage Spaces but it does put recently written files at risk, say a power cut during a file copy.

Set-StoragePool -FriendlyName Backup -IsPowerProtected $true

Supposed to only enable that if you actually do have a UPS but it does give really good performance increase.

[3pwood]

19 hours ago, leadeater said:

This is also a way to speed up Storage Spaces but it does put recently written files at risk, say a power cut during a file copy.

Set-StoragePool -FriendlyName Backup -IsPowerProtected $true

Supposed to only enable that if you actually do have a UPS but it does give really good performance increase.

Wow! Aren't you just a wealth of knowledge. Lol...so in conclusion you prefer storage spaces rather than onboard RAID 5...noted.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, 3pwood said:

Wow! Aren't you just a wealth of knowledge. Lol...so in conclusion you prefer storage spaces rather than onboard RAID 5...noted.

Pretty much yea, though I don't like Storage Spaces parity that much either. Hardware RAID cards for RAID 5 are much simpler and more reliable when it comes to getting good speeds out of them, down side is they aren't cheap. I almost always use two-way mirror if I'm using Storage Spaces.

 

It's more a case of I really don't like motherboard RAID, unless it's a workstation/server board with an LSI embedded chip, so I'll use almost anything other than it.

[3pwood]

On 4/25/2018 at 3:30 AM, leadeater said:

Pretty much yea, though I don't like Storage Spaces parity that much either. Hardware RAID cards for RAID 5 are much simpler and more reliable when it comes to getting good speeds out of them, down side is they aren't cheap. I almost always use two-way mirror if I'm using Storage Spaces.

 

It's more a case of I really don't like motherboard RAID, unless it's a workstation/server board with an LSI embedded chip, so I'll use almost anything other than it.

Well the parity part is kinda the point for me doing RAID to begin with, lol...hmmm, will look into cards.