Having a pair of WD Black 5400 RPM laptop drives, 500 GB each, I was curious to play with the often maligned but occasionally praised Storage Spaces, specifically to check it's performance in a simple striped/RAID 0 array within Storage Spaces.
Alas, even the first step on in Creating Pool would error out using one or both drives through multiple attempts, I found a reference in a 4 month old Microsoft posting that disabling the driver within device mngr and rebooting, then re-enabling the driver might clear it. Shockingly...it did!
Upon creating the 'no resiliency'/simple striped array totaling 927 GB, and, attempting a large 14 GByte 7 -Zip folder transfer, I was pleasantly surprised to see very fast speeds the first several GB of data (must be caching it within RAM for the first 6-8 GB?) show transfers ramp from 200 MB/sec up to 800 MB/sec, scale up briefly to 1.4 GB/sec, then see speeds rapidly fall off to the expected ~150 MB/sec transfer speeds... ; CrstalDiskMark also showed ~150 MB sec reads/writes for the sequentials.
As those initial bursts of speeds would of course be impossible for 5400 RPM drives, even a mighty RAID 0, Windows must be just buffering a large chunk to RAM, as, certainly the drives cannot cache that much, I'd think, as the speeds ramped up to 1 - 1.4 GB/sec for the middle third of 2-3 GB of the transfer in the middle before falling off, as predicted.
I'll have to continue testing, see how much things are slowed down with a mirrored RAID-1 (a base single 5400 Rpm drive can only do about 110 MB/sec), etc....
As I'm hearing and now seeing decent reports of Storage Spaces reliability, I'll reconsider using it!
(As a side note, the Storage Space array even shows up as a 927 GB in size, clone/image worthy candidate in Macrium Reflect..)
Alas, even the first step on in Creating Pool would error out using one or both drives through multiple attempts, I found a reference in a 4 month old Microsoft posting that disabling the driver within device mngr and rebooting, then re-enabling the driver might clear it. Shockingly...it did!
Upon creating the 'no resiliency'/simple striped array totaling 927 GB, and, attempting a large 14 GByte 7 -Zip folder transfer, I was pleasantly surprised to see very fast speeds the first several GB of data (must be caching it within RAM for the first 6-8 GB?) show transfers ramp from 200 MB/sec up to 800 MB/sec, scale up briefly to 1.4 GB/sec, then see speeds rapidly fall off to the expected ~150 MB/sec transfer speeds... ; CrstalDiskMark also showed ~150 MB sec reads/writes for the sequentials.
As those initial bursts of speeds would of course be impossible for 5400 RPM drives, even a mighty RAID 0, Windows must be just buffering a large chunk to RAM, as, certainly the drives cannot cache that much, I'd think, as the speeds ramped up to 1 - 1.4 GB/sec for the middle third of 2-3 GB of the transfer in the middle before falling off, as predicted.
I'll have to continue testing, see how much things are slowed down with a mirrored RAID-1 (a base single 5400 Rpm drive can only do about 110 MB/sec), etc....
As I'm hearing and now seeing decent reports of Storage Spaces reliability, I'll reconsider using it!
(As a side note, the Storage Space array even shows up as a 927 GB in size, clone/image worthy candidate in Macrium Reflect..)
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