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I used to run a Windows Storage Spaces server for about 7 years. The last 2 years, as my pool kept larger and larger, I had more and more problems with Storage Spaces. I spent a long time considering other options including FreeNAS. I talked to people who were running, or used to use, FreeNAS and learned that FreeNAS has problems like Storage Spaces when the pool gets large. At that time, I was just over 80TB on the pool and having significant problems with Storage Spaces that I did not have when the pool was much smaller. The people I talked to about FreeNAS told me similar stories, it worked fine to a point and then when the pool got larger, they started having significant problems. In fact, the guys I talked to had already given up on FreeNAS and moved on to other options. I moved on to DrivePool and my experience has been much better. I am now over 80TB on my DrivePool server and, so far, have not seen the problems I experienced with Storage Spaces. There are some things I miss about the "promise" of Storage Spaces, but in real life, the performance of Storage Spaces falls short. My friends running FreeNAS told me the same story with using FreeNAS. I am not claiming that DrivePool is perfect, but it just seems to work better for me. After adding a SSD to DrivePool as a front end cache, I now get write speeds that exceeded my Storage Spaces setup. If you chose to duplicate some folders in DrivePool, then you have the option of using Read Striping and that can almost double your read speed in some scenarios. However, I chose DrivePool over other options not because it was faster, but rather because it just worked better for me. When a pool drive fails in DrivePool, you only lose the data on that one drive, not the entire pool (as happened to me in Storage Spaces). If you have duplication set on either the entire pool or just certain folders, you can rebuild the pool from the duplicated data. Also, when I have had HDDs fail, sometimes most of the data on that drive is still available and can be transferred back to the pool. In one instance, I had only 2 or 3 corrupt files on a 3TB HDD that was failing. I was able to move all good files off the drive before it finally, totally, failed.