Windows Storage Spaces on Windows 8, anyone using this?

[Malyngo]

I have currently 1 4TB disk on my system for recordings, but this is already quite packed, so I am thinking about adding maybe some kind of NAS for the record space, or using Windows Storage Spaces for the recordings in my machine.

Is anyone running Windows Storage Spaces on a Windows 8 machine for Argus?

I am currently in the process to test out Storage Spaces on three old ~250GB disks I have. I chose parity for these, and write times are really horrible. Falls down to something like 4 MB/s, at times even slower, going down to 1 MB/s for a few seconds.

So with Parity, I might have a bottleneck right there when doing 4 HD recordings at once.

Will do a test with 1 way mirror afterwards, this should give much faster write times (Don't want to go with simple, as this is just to risky to lose data).

[sgibbers17]

Storage spaces works but there are some caveats. If you use anything other than jbod if you want to expand you have to add more than one drive. For instance if you go with parity you need 3 drives to start so to expand you need a multiple of 3 drive to add. If you start with 4 drives you need 4 to expand . Mirror is similar if you pick the 2-way mirror you need a multiple of 2 drives and if you pick 3-way a multiple of 3 drives is needed

[Malyngo]

Thanks, that is really something I have to look into.
I thought Storage Spaces deliver more flexibility than Raid, so I will definitely check this.

[Christoph21x]

Storage spaces works but there are some caveats. If you use anything other than jbod if you want to expand you have to add more than one drive. For instance if you go with parity you need 3 drives to start so to expand you need a multiple of 3 drive to add. If you start with 4 drives you need 4 to expand . Mirror is similar if you pick the 2-way mirror you need a multiple of 2 drives and if you pick 3-way a multiple of 3 drives is needed

... like with every NAS if you don´t want to move all and re-format.
But my question is rather basic: I decided to run my two NAS with jbod (64 TB), makes asolutely no sense to me to look for redundancy just for movies. I lost ONE movie over a couple of years - and they´re resent every (felt) two weeks. As you write, you´re using it just for recordings. Far too expensive to me, any redundancy, just for recordings. If I want it for any movie, I burn a blueray...
... I maybe have done roughly 10 actually.

[sgibbers17]

I used storage spaces for a while until I needed to expand and found out that I needed to buy multiple hard drives or take everything off the storage space add one drive and then pout everything back. I then decided to go back to unRAID. I to don't care if I lose my tv shows or movies. But unRAID allows me to lose one drive and not lose anything and also allows me to expand one drive at a time.

[Malyngo]

Currently, I am using one 4TB disk for my recordings. If this dies, I will lose all of them. This wouldn't be the end of the world, but well, I think it would hurt.

So as I want to upgrade my storage space, I am thinking of how to make this a bit more resilient.
Going with something like Parity/Raid 5 this would mean an initial cost of 2 additional hdds instead of 1 to double the space, but I can then lose 1 hdd.

Now, what I have thougt until now was that if I add one more drive to the Storage pool, this would add it to the storage size, and after some time of rebuild I still had the (n-1)*diskspace size.
(In an example of 3 4TB drives, I'd end up with 8TB, adding another 4TB drive would up that to 12TB).

But from sgibbers17 experience, this is not how it will work with Storage Spaces. So I will have to look into that.

The other option might be a QNAP NAS, from what I understand, they have a upgrade path to add a drive to an existing NAS.
I am aware that while rebuilding the RAID, it won't be resilient at that time, and if I lose a disk, the data is gone.

Oh, one more thing: Those crappy write times I mentioned earlier are the result of having two of the pools disk in a USB docking station. So write times are probably a bit better with the disks attacked properly via SATA.

[Malyngo]

Just found an article about Storage Spaces which explains what happens if I have a parity space, run out of space and add just one other drive to it:
http://arstechnica.com/information-tech ... -it-works/

The short of it: If I have 3 disks in there, that are 80% full, and then add another drive, the first 3 will still be 80% full, and when new files are written, eventually they will be 100% full while the new drive still is pretty empty.
It works to add just one drive, but it is recommended to add 3 additional drives, and if only adding 1, it might not have the effect of really adding more diskspace to the pool.

So I guess it would be possible to add only 1 drive, but to make good use of it, you would have to start copying things around a lot, so at some point the disks are roughly equally filled with data. Which probably is just a lot of hassle.

[Christoph21x]

Just an information for what concerns QNAP drives: adding drives later until FW 4.0.7 (now 4.1, didn´t test it with this), you couldn´t increase the size of the existing share by adding drives, you had to create a new share on the new drives. Mixed-mode was not bugfree (I had three drives parity and added another three qbod for testing), It had disconnects from time to time, and failures.

...and a comment: you barely never lose a whole drive at a time without prior notice of r/w failures.

[Hominidae]

...I use Stablebit DrivePool in my recorder to pool disks.
There is an option to duplicate Folders/disks for redundancy and that of a feeder disk as landing zone.
Very flexible as you can add/remove individual disks and each disks stays intact as a single NTFS Volume if need be.
Next to my ZFS-based NAS, this is IMHO the best, comfortable thing to use in the windoze world.
For backups I mount an iSCSI Volume on my NAS.

[andrewNZ]

I use DrivePool also. It's super flexible, and very resilient. I'd recommend it to anyone. The things I like the most are,
1) The ability to read data off the data disks individually in another machine. Data is stored in standard NTFS folders.
2) The ability to use any disk in the pool. Disk size and type doesn't matter, you can mix and match all you like.
3) you can add disks to the pool with data already on them.

I use Stablebit Scanner too. Together, DrivePool and Scanner:
- monitor disk health and temp, and avoid using disks if they're getting hot
- evacuate a failing disk in an attempt to minimise data loss. This works, I've had it happen.

Check them out, they're worth every cent.
There is a fully functional 30 day trial. And there's discount if you buy both.

Support is awesome too.