Interesting article about the pitfalls of ReFS and Storage Spaces.

[grimpr]

Long recovery times when disaster strikes, expensive recovery software needed plus more. Looks like Drivepool with duplication, good old NTFS and single non raided hard disks is the most stable way to maintain a home nas.  

 

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-features/31836-data-recovery-tales-when-windows-storage-spaces-go-bad

 

 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

There are already a number of utilities that can read and recovery data from ReFS drives. So that really isn't an issue. 

 

However, the real issue is with Storage Spaces.  Since it's a block based storage solution, you need to be able to parse the raw data on the drives. And since Storage Spaces hides the drives, as well.... it makes recovery tricky. 

Additionally, thin provisioning adds further complications, as well. 

 

And the larger the pool that you have, the longer it's going to take to run recovery.  One of the advantages that DrivePool has. If you want to run recovery, you run it on the underlying disk that is having issues, and just that disk. 

 

To be blunt, Storage Spaces should only be used with a Mirrored array, and with ReFS, IMO. 

 

 

This article was written in 2012 and a lot has changed since then.  

[Atarres]

I found that individually formatting drives as REFS adds the file integrity (preventing bitrot) and putting Drivepool on that is superior to Storage Spaces. You get the best of both worlds. Transferring data over on SSHDs onto Drivepool from main drive at about 154MBs.

 

When I had the storage spaces setup it topped off at 80MBs and degraded to about 25 at times using the exact same drives. A real PITA when moving 100s of GB of data. So REFS (individual formatted drives) + Drivepool is pretty damn solid. 

 

My setup uses all 3 products. I have 2 separate storage setups. A 12.7TB and a 50TB setup + a 10TB CloudDrive setup shared between both machines. I am considering upping that clouddrive setup to match my current storage to have a viable backup. 

 

That said getting REFS formatted is a PITA on Windows 10. They blocked the ability to easily do it after anniversary update. Using the registry hack means it will break damn near everything in the system because the system now things its a WInPE setup. However a workaround is formatting the drives (at least 1) as REFS. IF you can format ALL in WinPE great, I had issues because WinPE was not able to read all my drives so I formatted what I could. 

 

To workaround that I downloaded R-Studio Image (30 day trial works fine for this) and copied the partitions with the shrink/expand option in the event there was a size difference with the drive. This worked and now I have 7 2TB drives formatted in REFS with Drivepool. 

 

As this setup is pretty new, I will give it a few weeks of shakedown time, but I will start to look at setting up games in there if the performance is solid.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

@Atarres:

 

The "MiniNT" registry tree is what causes the issue. But then again, this tree is ONLY present in WinPE.  It's the legacy name of WinPE, actually.  

 

So that it breaks things should be expected.  And its' why it's always been a "hack".

 

But yes, it does make things difficult on Windows 10.....

Another workaround is to boot from an install disk temporarily, or use a VM and a passed through disk.