Question about enabling ReFS

[TechB]

I setup Storage Spaces in Win10 with 5 drives only to discover later about the 4k cluster limit default setting. I was going to add new drives and create a new pool and then I found the 63TB limit within Storage Spaces. I downloaded a copy of DrivePool and install it last night and I am copying all my date from the original SS pool. I formatted my drives as ReFS with 64k cluster size. I see that the pool is labeled as ReFS. I found an article here in the forums about ReFS but it was written in 2017. It suggested that metadata tracking is all that is on by default and it said to run the following command.

Set-FileIntegrity H:\ -Enable $True

Should I be doing this for the drive letters of the physical drive letters (or mount points) or should I be doing this for the drive letter of the pool or both?

Does the Scanner now support ReFS? Is support for ReFS still limited across the platform like it was in 2017 or are there new details I should be aware of? I checked the manual for DrivePool but didn't find much.

 

Thanks in advance!

[Christopher (Drashna)]

For ReFS, you'd want to run the comman for the underlying disks, as the Pool itself doesn't use/honor this. 

As for StableBit Scanner, adding ReFS support basically means reverse engineering the file system.  It's not a small task, and isn't a high priority, at this time. 

[TechB]

57 minutes ago, Christopher (Drashna) said:

For ReFS, you'd want to run the comman for the underlying disks, as the Pool itself doesn't use/honor this. 

As for StableBit Scanner, adding ReFS support basically means reverse engineering the file system.  It's not a small task, and isn't a high priority, at this time. 

Thanks Chris. I ended up chickening out on Storage Spaces and ReFS. Having seen a fair amount of disk failures in my day, I was concerned what would happen if a disk (or worse a chassis of disks) failed. I saw where a few users reported various issues with ReFS. One person claimed a Windows Update to ReFS forced one of his drives to report as RAW. I was concerned about the ability to move the disks to a new Windows 10 machine and read from them. Further the fact that MS pulled ReFS from W10 Pro gives me pause. I got a refund on my W10 Pro Wkstn license from Microsoft and I am running DrivePool with NTFS and 2M blocks. I also have a SSD coming which I will setup for caching writes. I feel safe with the mirroring option but of course it's a lot more disks to spend money on. I also thought about deploying SS with parity (NTFS) and then pooling with Drivepool and using the SSD cache as well. I wonder about stability there and I still wonder about the ability to move the media to a new PC if it fails. It seems I have to rely more heavily on backups and at these sorts of data sizes, thats a lot of data to push to the cloud and it would take a good amount of time to restore it. Since you are a long time user of DP and have used ReFS and SS, I am curious at to your thoughts. You don't need to steer me to to the DP family just to get the sale. Frankly, I would buy the suite anyway just for some great advice. Prior to this project I have relied on hardware raid NAS units (Synology) but I chose to move to DAS for speed when converting media and to reduce network traffic and complexity. Having worked with Windows client and server products for a long time, I question the reliability of SS vs a hardware raid company like Synology. Thanks!

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Nothing wrong with that.  And honestly, at this point, I would recommend NTFS, in general. 

As for the software, I've recently seen some issues with drives larger than 64TB.  Which is troubling. 

But I was never really impressed with the performance from Storage Spaces.  And the biggest issue for me is disaster recovery.  If you loose too many disks, you're SOL. The entire array is gone.    I never really liked that. Though, there are ways to help prevent that. 

But mostly, I really love the simplicity that StableBit DrivePool has.  It's what drove me to the product in the first place, and why I started working for covecube. 

 

As for stuff like Synology, that's not hardware RAID.  It's a linux file system, IIRC.   But it's a well tested on, IIRC.  I've never used synology though. Too rich for my blood when it was usable, and too small for my needs now. 

But if you have a solution that you like and that works for you, that's awesome!  Even if it's not with our software.