Question Windows Server 2019 Storage Spaces (not S2D)

[OrlyP]

Has anyone played around with Windows Server Storage Spaces? I have a few questions. But first, some background:

I have Plex Media Server running on a Windows Server 2019 box. All my Plex media is stored in a Drive Bender pool using an assortment of 3TB and 4TB drives, all in the same box. Recently, one of the 4TB drive failed. I'm still reeling from this loss but thankfully, I have folder duplication enabled on personal folders and files, but not for the Plex media. That said, I will have to re-rip a lot of those media that came down with the drive.

Which then brings me to consider using Windows Server Storage Spaces to have drive redundancy.

I am just starting to understand the concepts (physical disks, pool, virtual disks, volumes, etc.) and I'm thinking of buying a bunch of small capacity SATA drives to play around in the lab to see how the system behaves under a myriad of storage and failure scenarios. I realize that it's no ZFS for sure, but I'm really FreeBSD and Linux illiterate and would rather do everything in Windows.

Anyway, it will help me if my big ticket questions below are answered.

1. How is the read/write performance? I read that Windows 10 Storage Spaces was particularly bad. But I also read that the Windows Server 2019 Storage Spaces is a totally different (read: Enterprise class) solution.

2. How flexible is it in utilizing space from different-sized drives in the same pool when in parity mode?

3. NTFS vs ReFS... which one would be best suited for my use case (Plex media server and glorified NAS), and why?

4. This is probably a long shot but I have to ask: Is it possible to switch pool layouts between Simple, Mirror, and Parity and vice versa without destroying the pool?

5. How is it on system resources? Particularly, if Parity is selected. Is Storage Pools hard on the CPU, memory, disk I/O, or a combination?

Thanks!

 

[mdd1963]

"
4. This is probably a long shot but I have to ask: Is it possible to switch pool layouts between Simple, Mirror, and Parity and vice versa without destroying the pool?"
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It cannot be changed, but, it appears you can overprovision/create a new pool on top of the existing one, up to near whatever amount of unused space is left...

Presumably, you could then (after backing up or transferring) delete the old original pool of whatever type...

CPU usage- My CPU usage on a 4c/8t cpu (7700K) only went from 2% to 5% during writes to a striped array....; sorry, I don't have another drive to test reads/writes on a parity array...; RAM usage only went up by 1 GB during the copy....

I saw a few reviews from 2-3 years ago that showed pretty low (30-35 MB/sec writes?) speeds on Storage Space writes to a 3-drive parity array, but, I am eager to see a new test on a 3 drive striped array myself; testing on a 2 drive simple stripe showed ~145 MB/sec writes after RAM cached speeds (200 MB/sec scaling up to 800 MB/sec briefly, even a second or two of 1400 MB/sec!) of the first few GB was exhausted...