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REFS in pool


thepregnantgod

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I believe but not certain that it could also be one more Benefit of storage space from what I have read it will upgrade refs on the fly but I would have to read up some more to confirm.

 

Apparently it does upgrade refs but you can't downgrade so if you put the drives in a windows 10 machine they wouldn't work on anything else at the moment they are going to update server 2016 with the new refs version

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Wow - I've really hit the write speed limit on these SMR drives as I empty them out --> Reformat as REFS V3 --> add back to the pool --> copy next drive to it --> repeat for the next drive etc.  Once I've burnt through their 20GB cache I'm seeing maybe 30MB average for writes, all up this is going to take a couple of weeks to do the 6 x 8TB drives.  Don't get me wrong, I do like the Seagate Archive drives and they are fast enough to eat multiple BD rips and plenty fast to read off, but if you are rebuilding a pool or doing mass file moves then they are sloooooow.  

 

Yup, been there, done that.   On the plus side, the balancing should be less likely to hit this issue, as it's "slow" by default. 

 

As for "fast enough", I see 190MB/s sequential reads.  They're blazing fast... when reading from.  But writes, yeah .... not so much. 

I believe but not certain that it could also be one more Benefit of storage space from what I have read it will upgrade refs on the fly but I would have to read up some more to confirm.

 

Apparently it does upgrade refs but you can't downgrade so if you put the drives in a windows 10 machine they wouldn't work on anything else at the moment they are going to update server 2016 with the new refs version

 

I'd not seen that, so I'd have to check into it.  But sounds like something Microsoft would do with storage spaces.... 

 

And yeah, not sure why Server 2016 doesn't have the same code as 1703 yet ...

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As for "fast enough", I see 190MB/s sequential reads.  They're blazing fast... when reading from.  But writes, yeah .... not so much. 

 

Yup copy over my NW (10GBit), I'm getting 160MB/Sec from a Seagate SMR on Pool1 to a HDS on Pool2.  Nice.

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FYI I found in my wanderings you can specify to turn on Integraty during the format and also select what version of ReFS you want to format, eg:

format e: /fs:refs /i:enable = ReFS V3.2

format e: /fs:refsv1 /i:enable = ReFS V1.2

 

Nice! Good to know!

 

Yup copy over my NW (10GBit), I'm getting 160MB/Sec from a Seagate SMR on Pool1 to a HDS on Pool2.  Nice.

 

Very nice.  :) 

 

However, are you using 64KB clusters?  If not, ... well, that's why I get the nice read speeds.  I did some testing when I first a SMR drive.  Cluster size matters. And can only be (safely) set when formatting. 

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Just a reminder that in Fall Creator builds (Insider) that ReFS support is removed probably due to OneDrive not supporting it.  FSUTIL does not have the option any longer. As of build 16257 the Format option via PowerShell looks to still be available, but formatting via File Explorer has been removed.

 

I suspect all support to create new ReFS drives will be removed in Home and Pro versions of Windows 10.

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Looks like this was a prep for the "Windows 10 pro for Workstations" SKU ....

 

I'm not sure how I feel about this, as it ... it feels kind of scummy.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16128072/microsoft-windows-10-pro-for-workstations-features

 

Specifically, it add s ReFS support,  SMB Direct, RDMA, and some other server features.   And it's upping the hardware limit (4 sockets, rather than 2, and 6TB of RAM, rather than 2TB).   So this is clearly aimed at high end users, that probably can't/don't want to get Enterprise. 

 

 

Just a reminder that in Fall Creator builds (Insider) that ReFS support is removed probably due to OneDrive not supporting it.  FSUTIL does not have the option any longer. As of build 16257 the Format option via PowerShell looks to still be available, but formatting via File Explorer has been removed.

 

I suspect all support to create new ReFS drives will be removed in Home and Pro versions of Windows 10.

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FYI - on my Windows 10 Pro for Workstations box the ReFS drives have been upgrade (automatically) to ReFS V3.3 (I had formated them as V3.2 which was the latest at the time).

PS C:\Users\natha> fsutil fsinfo refsinfo C:\Users\natha\Desktop\MountPoints\045f6
REFS Volume Serial Number :       0x52e2b127e2b10fe9
REFS Version   :                  3.3
Number Sectors :                  0x00000003a37c0000
Total Clusters :                  0x000000000746f800
Free Clusters  :                  0x0000000000011f0d
Total Reserved :                  0x0000000000078408
Bytes Per Sector  :               512
Bytes Per Physical Sector :       4096
Bytes Per Cluster :               65536
Checksum Type:                    CHECKSUM_TYPE_CRC64

 

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1 hour ago, McFaul said:

My main issue AGAINST storage spaces is that the underlying disks dont show up in stablebit scanner anymore

it must be possible since HDD sentinel can still show/test the individual disk data 

Yeah, it is.  It's entirely different data structure that is used.  And a few other products use it as well.

So, we are aware of it.

 

There are two problems though,

  • How to display the disk info in a meaningful way
  • Can the drives be scanned using the newer method

Chances are, implementing the newer method will require a significant code change.  So, it's something that we haven't gotten to yet.

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Does anyone know if you can "upgrade" ReFS V1.2 to V3.1 on Server 2016 without reformatting?  

FYI - I've seen on my Windows Pro for Workstations the ReFS gets automatically upgraded between sub versions (as per the table in this post).

 

Thanks

Nathan

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