I've never subscribed to a video series based on having watched a single video - until today. This was the most succinct, comprehensive, easy to follow video I've watched to date. I look forward to watching past and future videos you've done. Five gold starts!!!!!
With storage spaces, can I expand the pool and storage with parity? For example I have 3 2tb drives, can I add a large 5tb drive, and replace one of the 2tb with a larger one, without reformatting?
Israel, great question my gut answer is no, but I would have to dig into some of the technical literature to see for sure. Adding the same drives with the same size is a sure bet but mixing sizes can introduce limitations.
Great point, remember if you are looking for speed not redundancy (data on more than one physical disk) or resilience (protection from file/disk corruption) you want to move to standard RAID controllers and disk arrays. They give much better performance and some (not all) of the above.
@@TechsavvyProductions I get decent speeds on a pair of drives, simple or mirrored, about 145-150 MB/sec reads and writes even on large file transfers, but, I see reports of parity arrays being but 35 MB/sec....OUCH! I will have to acquire a 3rd drive to confirm this abysmal parity performance myself.
Update: one of the other channels (Electronics Wizardry?) claims that writes can be boosted if when formatting within Storage Spaces to selecting 512K blocks instead of default 4096 size? His writes jumped from classic abysmal 32 MB/sec to 350 MB sec.....; notable increase, to say the least!@@TechsavvyProductions
Learned the hard way not to use the enclosures's RAID. My Yottamaster external enclosure raid corrupted one of my drives, and I had to wipe and reformat (not quick). Took me hours and I had lost my 2nd local backup for days.
Great video! I have a very strange problem with a new M50CYP Intel server. This server offers up to 12 modern front-mounted U.2 NVMEs but these seem to be presented as "removable" to Windows Server 2022, probably because they are hot-swapable. So Bitlocker only offers "Bitlocker To Go" for these drives. This means that I am not able to auto-unlock them on reboot and cannot auto-start the VMs I place on these drives. Do you have any idea how to fix this? Searching through forums it seems that this strange behavior is somehow defined in the BIOS and can't be changed.
Do you have to allocate the entire physical disk to Storage Spaces? For example, if you have two physical drives, and on each drive you create two partitions: Partition #1 (on each drive) will be for standard use. Partition #2 (on each drive) will be for use in Storage Spaces. Is the above (partition #2) choice possible? Thank you.
I know this is an old vid. Hopefully you still read the comments. I have a storage spaces pool set up all internal drives 2-way mirror and it is SOOOOO slow in the write process it is painful to do backups. I have a separate OS drive backup imaging drive I use and to copy an image from it to the storage space it take 12+ hours!!! If I try to do a backup image directly to storage spaces it will take 20 hours!!!! going directly to my back up drive it takes 6 minutes to image. What is wrong with my setup? Is there any way to fix it without DATA loss? any advice is appreciated. Thanks!!!
Here are a couple of articles to check out: www.itprotoday.com/cloud-storage/how-improve-windows-storage-spaces-write-performance wasteofserver.com/storage-spaces-with-parity-very-slow-writes-solved/
Is a pseudo raid 10 possible with storage spaces? I planning on using 2 pairs of 4tb drives in a two way mirror each, then making a new space from the 2 pairs in a “simple” layout.
Tedd: these are your official Microsoft options with Windows 10 storage spaces: Your can create a simple, mirror, or parity space! Simple spaces are designed for increased performance, but don't protect your files from drive failure. They're best for temporary data (such as video rendering files), image editor scratch files, and intermediary compiler object files. Simple spaces require at least two drives to be useful. Mirror spaces are designed for increased performance and protect your files from drive failure by keeping multiple copies. Two-way mirror spaces make two copies of your files and can tolerate one drive failure, while three-way mirror spaces can tolerate two drive failures. Mirror spaces are good for storing a broad range of data, from a general-purpose file share to a VHD library. When a mirror space is formatted with the Resilient File System (ReFS), Windows will automatically maintain your data integrity, which makes your files even more resilient to drive failure. Two-way mirror spaces require at least two drives, and three-way mirror spaces require at least five. Parity spaces are designed for storage efficiency and protect your files from drive failure by keeping multiple copies. Parity spaces are best for archival data and streaming media, like music and videos. This storage layout requires at least three drives to protect you from a single drive failure and at least seven drives to protect you from two drive failures. Thanks for watching!
Hey thanks lowell for the quick reponse, i just have a follow up question. So is there anyway that i can configure a mirror space of 4 drives to work like a raid 10? I read somewhere in reddit that i can configure the column number with powershell though i’m still a little confused on how to do it. I’m planning on using a 4bay enclousure as a currents project video editing drive so better read and write speed performance would be nice.
Great question, I am not aware of any "standards" organizations looking into a replacement for GPT on workstations and servers. That does not mean that there are not specialty applications that might be using some cutting edge technology.
I had a RAID 1 which unRAIDed when I did a BIOS update so now I hear RAID is not the best so might try the Storage Spaces thing. I have two 4 TB HDDs internal. What I like to know is the size setting of the pool is it ok to just set it to the full drive size or am I better to set up more smaller size pools? Once the two drives are set up as storage spaces in two-way mirror, in disk management do they appear as one drive like RAID 1? I have done a backup of my D drive, so when I setup Storage Spaces the drives are formatted I then restore from my backup it will write to the both drives at the same time is that how it works? I liked the video, it is very informative and have subscribed. The ReFS file system is there issues for copying those files to another drive that is NTFS?
I would use the full drive rather than smaller pools once you setup two-way mirror you will have one logical drive, be sure to use ReFS, it is transparent when moving data to and from NTFS. Thanks for watching!
Great video. I have been using storage spaces for a while now. For some reason the total available capacity remaining is shown differently in windows explorer (this pc) and within storage spaces itself. Shouldn’t they match?
You should see less in explorer than storage spaces, you lose some space due to NTFS or ReFS file system and so explorer shows what is left for free space. Storage spaces just shows raw values and is usually higher. Storage spaces should should loss in GB due to the type of resiliency you choose.
@@TechsavvyProductions Thank you for your reply. Weirdly mine is the other way round. The manage storage spaces window shows using 5.94tb of 7.27 (two way mirror using two 4tb drives) so that’s a total of 1.33tb remaining. It also says both physical drives are 81.6% full. Windows shows 4.35tb free of 7.26tb. So windows is showing it way higher. Lastly, my offsite drive which is an exact copy of the data on the storage space and is also a 4tb drive is showing 747gb free which is what I would expect the storage space to be. I cannot understand what is going on with it.
I have been using ReFS *WITHOUT* Storage Spaces on many HDDs - internal and external - for years. So that's easily possible. Shows up in Disk Management just fine. What you lose is automatic correction of bit flip/rot errors. But all the other functions (eg. meta data protection and integrity streams) work just fine on single disks without Storage Spaces.
The newer versions of Windows 10 Pro - Edu - Ent are now allowing ReFS without Storage Spaces, it still does not support a boot drive. A couple of thoughts on ReFS vs NTFS: When to Choose ReFS over NTFS Storage Spaces (and Storage Spaces Direct) environments Extremely large volumes Extremely large VHDXs
Fantastic series. Question - do you think youll make an AD course? like geared towards System admins? like rolling out patches, file shares, etc. I would gladly pay for it.
CT your topic is a good one and as Microsoft pushes Enterprise to Azure they care less about the admins with AD. Not sure how much interest there is in this topic. If you are interested connect via my email and I can point you to some good resources. mrvanderpool@techsavvyproductions.com
Ah, I finally found your video again. I used it to set up a 3 HDD external USB storage pool, with parity. It worked just fine. But now I'm running out of disk space, so I bought a fourth HDD and put it in my 4 bay Sabrent "toaster". I'm having a difficult time adding the new drive to the storage pool. Storage Spaces (the version accessible through Settings) doesn't see the new drive. Diskmanager sees it just fine. But Storage Spaces says I don't have any physical drives that can be added. I tried the version of Storage Spaces through Control Panel and it tells me I need to add *THREE DRIVES!* Huh? I can't use parity with *FOUR* drives total? BTW, I'm using Windows 11 Home.
You may have to add more than 1 drive to expand your parity array. See forum thread forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/expanding-storage-spaces-parity-array.8419/
Actually, M$ removed the ability to create ReFS volumes from all versions of Windows 10 except for "Windows 10 Pro for Workstations". ReFS may be reliable but it sure as shit isn't resilient. You can format a disk as ReFS via Explorer, cli, as well as disk management & storage spaces...
To say that the new Windows Storage is “production” ready, is to say you have not seen or heard the issues that people have encountered... Your data may still be there, but if you cannot mount the storage, you have NO data!!
Great point, I have read and seen the tears of many of folk who played with Storage Spaces. Using same size same make and model HDs can really stable the overall reliability of the technology and having a backup of your Windows environment in the case of a operating system crash is critical. Thanks for the comment and for watching!
I've never subscribed to a video series based on having watched a single video - until today. This was the most succinct, comprehensive, easy to follow video I've watched to date. I look forward to watching past and future videos you've done.
Five gold starts!!!!!
Thank you for the kind words, welcome to the channel!
@@TechsavvyProductions is it possible to treat disks on an drive enclosure as interal bootable disks by my PC
asus prime b550 plus
Thanks, Lowell. Great video. Learnt a lot from you.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Thanks for your video, tips, and the notes (wish more how to tech video makers did that). Very helpful!
Glad it was helpful! Google does not support content creators on the site and most have to move to pay walls.
With storage spaces, can I expand the pool and storage with parity? For example I have 3 2tb drives, can I add a large 5tb drive, and replace one of the 2tb with a larger one, without reformatting?
Israel, great question my gut answer is no, but I would have to dig into some of the technical literature to see for sure. Adding the same drives with the same size is a sure bet but mixing sizes can introduce limitations.
08:03 fastest transfer rates? Like, for instance...35 MB/sec write speeds on a 3 or 4 disk parity array?
Great point, remember if you are looking for speed not redundancy (data on more than one physical disk) or resilience (protection from file/disk corruption) you want to move to standard RAID controllers and disk arrays. They give much better performance and some (not all) of the above.
@@TechsavvyProductions I get decent speeds on a pair of drives, simple or mirrored, about 145-150 MB/sec reads and writes even on large file transfers, but, I see reports of parity arrays being but 35 MB/sec....OUCH! I will have to acquire a 3rd drive to confirm this abysmal parity performance myself.
The parity option does have the greatest performance hit, hopefully Microsoft will address this problem.
@@TechsavvyProductions threw in a 3rd drive to see for myself, and...30-32 MB/sec writes....! They need to fix that ASAP!
Update: one of the other channels (Electronics Wizardry?) claims that writes can be boosted if when formatting within Storage Spaces to selecting 512K blocks instead of default 4096 size? His writes jumped from classic abysmal 32 MB/sec to 350 MB sec.....; notable increase, to say the least!@@TechsavvyProductions
Learned the hard way not to use the enclosures's RAID. My Yottamaster external enclosure raid corrupted one of my drives, and I had to wipe and reformat (not quick). Took me hours and I had lost my 2nd local backup for days.
Enclosures are just hardware and yes they can fail and with a RAID that can be painful.
Great video! I have a very strange problem with a new M50CYP Intel server. This server offers up to 12 modern front-mounted U.2 NVMEs but these seem to be presented as "removable" to Windows Server 2022, probably because they are hot-swapable. So Bitlocker only offers "Bitlocker To Go" for these drives. This means that I am not able to auto-unlock them on reboot and cannot auto-start the VMs I place on these drives. Do you have any idea how to fix this? Searching through forums it seems that this strange behavior is somehow defined in the BIOS and can't be changed.
Because it is new server I would contact your server vendor. Could be a known issue.
Do you have to allocate the entire physical disk to Storage Spaces?
For example, if you have two physical drives, and on each drive you create two partitions:
Partition #1 (on each drive) will be for standard use.
Partition #2 (on each drive) will be for use in Storage Spaces.
Is the above (partition #2) choice possible?
Thank you.
You do have to allocate the physical disk.
I am using Windows 11 Home and I wasn't given the option to use ReFS. I wonder if they took it out of 11, or if I need the Pro version to use it?
www.thewindowsclub.com/refs-resilient-file-system-windows
This was very helpful.
Thanks for watching!
hello very nice video thank you for your time and effort, +1sub :)
one small note: at 09:45 you made a typo, it's not 10mbit but 10gbit ;)
cheers!
Always appreciate the comments and corrections, they are welcome!
I know this is an old vid. Hopefully you still read the comments. I have a storage spaces pool set up all internal drives 2-way mirror and it is SOOOOO slow in the write process it is painful to do backups. I have a separate OS drive backup imaging drive I use and to copy an image from it to the storage space it take 12+ hours!!! If I try to do a backup image directly to storage spaces it will take 20 hours!!!! going directly to my back up drive it takes 6 minutes to image. What is wrong with my setup? Is there any way to fix it without DATA loss? any advice is appreciated. Thanks!!!
Here are a couple of articles to check out: www.itprotoday.com/cloud-storage/how-improve-windows-storage-spaces-write-performance wasteofserver.com/storage-spaces-with-parity-very-slow-writes-solved/
Very detailed video as always, I've been watching your videos for a long time Lowell, you never fail to educate me more on tech and computers!
Thanks for watching!
Thank you man, Microsoft storage spaces almost same as Apple Raid Utility from Disk Utility and Linux LVM
They are share some characteristics.
Is a pseudo raid 10 possible with storage spaces? I planning on using 2 pairs of 4tb drives in a two way mirror each, then making a new space from the 2 pairs in a “simple” layout.
Tedd: these are your official Microsoft options with Windows 10 storage spaces:
Your can create a simple, mirror, or parity space!
Simple spaces are designed for increased performance, but don't protect your files from drive failure. They're best for temporary data (such as video rendering files), image editor scratch files, and intermediary compiler object files. Simple spaces require at least two drives to be useful.
Mirror spaces are designed for increased performance and protect your files from drive failure by keeping multiple copies. Two-way mirror spaces make two copies of your files and can tolerate one drive failure, while three-way mirror spaces can tolerate two drive failures. Mirror spaces are good for storing a broad range of data, from a general-purpose file share to a VHD library. When a mirror space is formatted with the Resilient File System (ReFS), Windows will automatically maintain your data integrity, which makes your files even more resilient to drive failure. Two-way mirror spaces require at least two drives, and three-way mirror spaces require at least five.
Parity spaces are designed for storage efficiency and protect your files from drive failure by keeping multiple copies. Parity spaces are best for archival data and streaming media, like music and videos. This storage layout requires at least three drives to protect you from a single drive failure and at least seven drives to protect you from two drive failures.
Thanks for watching!
Hey thanks lowell for the quick reponse, i just have a follow up question. So is there anyway that i can configure a mirror space of 4 drives to work like a raid 10? I read somewhere in reddit that i can configure the column number with powershell though i’m still a little confused on how to do it. I’m planning on using a 4bay enclousure as a currents project video editing drive so better read and write speed performance would be nice.
Great vids, thanks for sharing!.
What do you think about run chkdsk command in SSD disks?
kb.sandisk.com/app/answersweb/detailweb/a_id/23582/~/is-it-safe-to-run-chkdsk-on-an-ssd%3F
are there any partitioning types newer than gpt ?
Great question, I am not aware of any "standards" organizations looking into a replacement for GPT on workstations and servers. That does not mean that there are not specialty applications that might be using some cutting edge technology.
Excellent Job!!!!
Thanks for watching!
I had a RAID 1 which unRAIDed when I did a BIOS update so now I hear RAID is not the best so might try the Storage Spaces thing. I have two 4 TB HDDs internal. What I like to know is the size setting of the pool is it ok to just set it to the full drive size or am I better to set up more smaller size pools? Once the two drives are set up as storage spaces in two-way mirror, in disk management do they appear as one drive like RAID 1? I have done a backup of my D drive, so when I setup Storage Spaces the drives are formatted I then restore from my backup it will write to the both drives at the same time is that how it works? I liked the video, it is very informative and have subscribed. The ReFS file system is there issues for copying those files to another drive that is NTFS?
I would use the full drive rather than smaller pools once you setup two-way mirror you will have one logical drive, be sure to use ReFS, it is transparent when moving data to and from NTFS. Thanks for watching!
Great video. I have been using storage spaces for a while now. For some reason the total available capacity remaining is shown differently in windows explorer (this pc) and within storage spaces itself. Shouldn’t they match?
You should see less in explorer than storage spaces, you lose some space due to NTFS or ReFS file system and so explorer shows what is left for free space. Storage spaces just shows raw values and is usually higher. Storage spaces should should loss in GB due to the type of resiliency you choose.
@@TechsavvyProductions Thank you for your reply. Weirdly mine is the other way round. The manage storage spaces window shows using 5.94tb of 7.27 (two way mirror using two 4tb drives) so that’s a total of 1.33tb remaining. It also says both physical drives are 81.6% full. Windows shows 4.35tb free of 7.26tb. So windows is showing it way higher. Lastly, my offsite drive which is an exact copy of the data on the storage space and is also a 4tb drive is showing 747gb free which is what I would expect the storage space to be. I cannot understand what is going on with it.
I have been using ReFS *WITHOUT* Storage Spaces on many HDDs - internal and external - for years. So that's easily possible. Shows up in Disk Management just fine.
What you lose is automatic correction of bit flip/rot errors. But all the other functions (eg. meta data protection and integrity streams) work just fine on single disks without Storage Spaces.
The newer versions of Windows 10 Pro - Edu - Ent are now allowing ReFS without Storage Spaces, it still does not support a boot drive. A couple of thoughts on ReFS vs NTFS: When to Choose ReFS over NTFS
Storage Spaces (and Storage Spaces Direct) environments
Extremely large volumes
Extremely large VHDXs
Fantastic series. Question - do you think youll make an AD course? like geared towards System admins? like rolling out patches, file shares, etc. I would gladly pay for it.
CT your topic is a good one and as Microsoft pushes Enterprise to Azure they care less about the admins with AD. Not sure how much interest there is in this topic. If you are interested connect via my email and I can point you to some good resources. mrvanderpool@techsavvyproductions.com
Nice video!!
Thanks for watching!
I need help....
Thanks for watching!
No longer posible. Only available in Windows 10 for Workstation
Thanks for the feedback!
Ah, I finally found your video again. I used it to set up a 3 HDD external USB storage pool, with parity. It worked just fine.
But now I'm running out of disk space, so I bought a fourth HDD and put it in my 4 bay Sabrent "toaster". I'm having a difficult time adding the new drive to the storage pool.
Storage Spaces (the version accessible through Settings) doesn't see the new drive. Diskmanager sees it just fine. But Storage Spaces says I don't have any physical drives that can be added.
I tried the version of Storage Spaces through Control Panel and it tells me I need to add *THREE DRIVES!* Huh? I can't use parity with *FOUR* drives total?
BTW, I'm using Windows 11 Home.
You may have to add more than 1 drive to expand your parity array. See forum thread forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/expanding-storage-spaces-parity-array.8419/
Actually, M$ removed the ability to create ReFS volumes from all versions of Windows 10 except for "Windows 10 Pro for Workstations". ReFS may be reliable but it sure as shit isn't resilient. You can format a disk as ReFS via Explorer, cli, as well as disk management & storage spaces...
You are correct! A change I was not aware of! Thanks for the update and comment!
To say that the new Windows Storage is “production” ready, is to say you have not seen or heard the issues that people have encountered...
Your data may still be there, but if you cannot mount the storage, you have NO data!!
Great point, I have read and seen the tears of many of folk who played with Storage Spaces. Using same size same make and model HDs can really stable the overall reliability of the technology and having a backup of your Windows environment in the case of a operating system crash is critical. Thanks for the comment and for watching!