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Refs and storage spaces


lee1978

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Hi Chris

 

I spent most of today in a meeting with a small tech company demonstrating refs and storage spaces that was the main focus however other software was also used in the demo drivepool was one of them.

 

While I think due to reading negative reviews I have never even looked at storage spaces I have to say I was very impressed with how they presented it disconnecting drives pulling the power plug, taking a drive out and connecting to another machine to show the data is still readable and to find it's very much on par with drivepool. Also the read and write speeds were good.The closets software they compared it to was drivepool which they had much praise for the only negative comment was the lack of refs support in drivepool and the benefits of using refs so is refs support on the todo list and can it be fully integrated into drivepool to take advantage of its file healing this would eliminate the need for the file safe program we have been asking for so a bit of a trade off.

 

Lee

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Well, for Storage Spaces, not really a lot has changed. The 2012R2 version didn't really bring any improvements to it, IIRC.

And that's very odd that you had issues with the RED drives. 

 

As for cache, well, if you have duplication (redundancy) enabled in StableBit DrivePool, it does do read striping (no, this isn't as fast as it would be with RAID, but we do a number of optimizations, based on the system:

http://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=Performance%20Options

 

Additionally, we do have the "SSD Optimizer" that works as a write cache. 

https://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Plugins

 

But as for a read cache? The problem is that it would still have to read from the hard drives, and that will still slow it down, and would really make it take longer. 

 

 

And as for redundancy, the term we use is "duplication", specifically.  And this can be configured "globally", and it can be configured per folder.  Additionally, you can set it higher than the default "x2" duplication, for stuff that you want well protected.

http://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=File%20Protection

I've been reading this all on my cellphone, been out in the data hall installing PDUs. You know how annoying it is to use speech to text with noise cancellation. You say farm, it writs fart.

 

I was thinking the SSD Optimizer was for running multiple SSDs as a pool, I haven't had the time to fully dive into it. 

 

As for duplication, a lot of my stuff I don't mind losing, however my collection of 720p TV Shows / DVDs, I do mind that. It's not been easy collecting 10TB of stuff. Especially when I ripped about 95% of them all, that 5% is the latest series. My idea was to tag team the pools. Whatever is in J:/ gets automatically uploaded to the Amazon Cloud Service, thus creating a "backup", however I'm thinking it might be in the best interest to setup RAID6 using 3TB drives in an 8 Bay Norco. I'll refer to our PMs for help with that :D

 

Well, StableBit still rocks Storage Spaces. I don't know what happened, maybe you can tell me exactly what this means.

 

post-2339-0-30568600-1454804316_thumb.png

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I've been reading this all on my cellphone, been out in the data hall installing PDUs. You know how annoying it is to use speech to text with noise cancellation. You say farm, it writs fart.

 

I was thinking the SSD Optimizer was for running multiple SSDs as a pool, I haven't had the time to fully dive into it. 

 

As for duplication, a lot of my stuff I don't mind losing, however my collection of 720p TV Shows / DVDs, I do mind that. It's not been easy collecting 10TB of stuff. Especially when I ripped about 95% of them all, that 5% is the latest series. My idea was to tag team the pools. Whatever is in J:/ gets automatically uploaded to the Amazon Cloud Service, thus creating a "backup", however I'm thinking it might be in the best interest to setup RAID6 using 3TB drives in an 8 Bay Norco. I'll refer to our PMs for help with that :D

 

Well, StableBit still rocks Storage Spaces. I don't know what happened, maybe you can tell me exactly what this means.

 

attachicon.gifstorage_pool.png

 

I've been reading this all on my cellphone, been out in the data hall installing PDUs. You know how annoying it is to use speech to text with noise cancellation. You say farm, it writs fart.

 

I was thinking the SSD Optimizer was for running multiple SSDs as a pool, I haven't had the time to fully dive into it. 

 

As for duplication, a lot of my stuff I don't mind losing, however my collection of 720p TV Shows / DVDs, I do mind that. It's not been easy collecting 10TB of stuff. Especially when I ripped about 95% of them all, that 5% is the latest series. My idea was to tag team the pools. Whatever is in J:/ gets automatically uploaded to the Amazon Cloud Service, thus creating a "backup", however I'm thinking it might be in the best interest to setup RAID6 using 3TB drives in an 8 Bay Norco. I'll refer to our PMs for help with that :D

 

Well, StableBit still rocks Storage Spaces. I don't know what happened, maybe you can tell me exactly what this means.

 

 

Reading a phone is a PITA! :)

 

And the SSD Optimizer (formerly "archive optimizer") was specifically to create a write cache using SSDs. 

Specifically, it uses the "Real time placement limiter" functionality to force writes to the "SSD" drives, and then later balances the files off of the "SSD" drives onto the "Archive" drives. 

So this definitely affects new files, but may not affect write speeds when modifying a file. 

 

 

As for the media collection, I completely understand. I've been there, and there are still things I'm finding that are missing. (movies mostly at this point). Duplication makes things easier. 

 

 

As for the Amazon Cloud Drive stuff, I'd say use StableBit CloudDrive, but the Amazon Cloud Drive provider part is not stable/reliable right now. If/when we can get it stable, that may be a viable option for you. :)

And yes, "offsite backup" of your data is a very good idea, especially in the case of disaster or theft.  

 

As for RAID, I've already replied about it, and .... I'm not a fan of parity, at all. And that's part of what drove me to Windows Home Server and Drive Extender, and then StableBit DrivePool. 

 

 

 

And as for Storage Space, no idea. But maybe a controller issue? I'd say check the Event Viewer and see what that says. 

But either way, very, very odd! 

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Just reporting back after a couple of months with 0 issues using ReFS on both my pools.

Thank you for the confirmation!

I've been using the ReFS on the "temp" pool I've been using and it hasn't any issues either. 

 

It sounds like there should be absolutely no issues with ReFS then.

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I think we are mixing terms of what bit does what,

- ReFS : Just a better disk format in terms of reliability in writing and managing files than NTFS.

- ReFS and Storage Spaces : Give the ability to pool disks as Simple, Mirror, or Parity Storage Spaces.  Mirror or Parity offers background scrubbing and error correction.  Parity Storage Spaces is described by MS for "where you want to maximise capacity and you're OK with lower write performance" 

 

For me DP on ReFS is the better soln as, I just want a "Simple" pool (as I backup to another pool), and

- While I'd like the background scrubbing and error correction, I'm not willing to lose 50% of my HDD space if using SS Mirror or the performance hit if using SS Parity on my main pool but I would consider using SS Parity on my Server 2012R2 Backup Pool.

- DP offers much finer level of control regarding how pools work than SS.  

- I look forward to "official" ReFS support in Drive Pool before I'd recommend the combination generally.

 

Thanks

Nathan

I have this setup. I had to boot into a WinPE setup and set up individually formatted REFS drives 7 of them @ 2TB each. No storage spaces. I installed DP on top of them, copied 270GB of data over to them and the performance was about 2x the speed I saw with the same hardware on Storage spaces. It also exceeded  a ZFS set up I had on the same hardware a while back as well. This combination has proven to be very fast. And with REFS as the underlying FS, my biggest concern is gone which is bitrot. 

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So ReFS is now an native format option in Windows 10 (from build 15042).  I'm not sure however if it is ReFS v1, v2, v3 (or some other difference) as drives I format as ReFS in Win 10 can not be read in Win Sever 2012R2, they appear as RAW (but as always, those formatted in 2012R2 can be read in Win10).

 

I can not find out much on the details of the new ReFS in Win 10 option, but it is good it has gone main stream!

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Hi Jmone

 

I did read that was the plan either a year or two ago from Microsoft I think they took there time maybe to give software developers time to work on the file system like yourself I have used refs for a while and been very happy with it I have two pools both indenticle one drivepool one using storage spaces and both run flawlessly I am just hoping Alex is going to find time soon to work on drive pool and add some new features especially full refs support.

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So ReFS is now an native format option in Windows 10 (from build 15042).  I'm not sure however if it is ReFS v1, v2, v3 (or some other difference) as drives I format as ReFS in Win 10 can not be read in Win Sever 2012R2, they appear as RAW (but as always, those formatted in 2012R2 can be read in Win10).

 

I can not find out much on the details of the new ReFS in Win 10 option, but it is good it has gone main stream!

 

Can confirm about the "RAW" thing. And there doesn't appear a way to force backwards compatibility or to format as an older version of ReFS.   So if you use Windows 10, no down-grading... 

 

 

Hi Jmone

 

I did read that was the plan either a year or two ago from Microsoft I think they took there time maybe to give software developers time to work on the file system like yourself I have used refs for a while and been very happy with it I have two pools both indenticle one drivepool one using storage spaces and both run flawlessly I am just hoping Alex is going to find time soon to work on drive pool and add some new features especially full refs support.

 

It's planned, or at least requested.  But just remember, a lot of the features will require reverse engineering to implement. Which takes time.  

 

But I'm going to keep pushing for it, because it would be fantastic. 

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I "presume" Server 2016 uses the newer ReFS version (I've seen reports saying V2 and V3 so no idea what is "correct" and what the differences are).

 

Nope.  At least not without an update.  The VM I have of 2016, it shows up as RAW. 

 

I suspect that this will be the case until the server gets it's version of the Creator's Update, or a cumulative update to patch this. 

 

As for the differences ..... it's impossible to tell without good documentation, or reverse engineering. 

 

That said, I've already alerted Alex to this, and it sounds like ReFS support is going to be at the top of the list (at least for Scanner, at first). 

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Good news on ReFS Support!... I love this format for my pools, with 0 issues to date.  It will be interesting to see when/if the Server Line gets the same ReFS version support as Windows 10 (esp as it has been out for a couple of months) and what all the V1/2/3 differences are.  I can not find any comparison table but only this presentation on V2 http://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/SDC15_presentations/file_sys/JRTipton_ReFS_v2.pdf

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