So I have built a new Plex box out of a combo of spare parts and some new drives, the box is running Windows Server 2019. What has occurred over the past week has been a journey into discovering how much of a mess RAID support is in the Windows world right now.
So what I originally had wanted was 3X - 4 TB Ironwolves in RAID-5 with a single 120 GB SSD as write cache. I have a 10 TB Barracuda Pro as backup drive for that array. My original plan was to use Intel IRST to manage this. Well it turns out Intel IRST only supports drives on the Intel mobo controller, it won't support other PCIe SATA controllers. So no go there.
Next up, RAID-5 with Windows Disk Manager. So this works but I can't easily expand the RAID with new drives and there is no way to add SSD cache.
Okay, lets try Windows Storage Spaces. This does work, but for a home user this is kind of a half baked mess and the parity support is beyond awful. It actually has fantastic read speed but the write speed is just ridiculous. Since the Storage Spaces GUI shoehorns you into a very specific type of setup the only way to actually setup a storage pool with the configuration I wanted was to build the entire thing in Powershell which involved a lot of trial and error with a bit of head banging. It was possible though.
So I keep getting recommended to use Drivepool. My issue with Drivepool is it means I lose parity (which is not the end of the world) but worse I lose the benefit of RAID-5 combined drive read speed (this is a deal breaker). So my question comes down to is there anyway for Drivepool to incorporate RAID-5 /parity arrays from Windows Disk Manager or Windows Storage Spaces into the pools?
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Nathan
So I have built a new Plex box out of a combo of spare parts and some new drives, the box is running Windows Server 2019. What has occurred over the past week has been a journey into discovering how much of a mess RAID support is in the Windows world right now.
So what I originally had wanted was 3X - 4 TB Ironwolves in RAID-5 with a single 120 GB SSD as write cache. I have a 10 TB Barracuda Pro as backup drive for that array. My original plan was to use Intel IRST to manage this. Well it turns out Intel IRST only supports drives on the Intel mobo controller, it won't support other PCIe SATA controllers. So no go there.
Next up, RAID-5 with Windows Disk Manager. So this works but I can't easily expand the RAID with new drives and there is no way to add SSD cache.
Okay, lets try Windows Storage Spaces. This does work, but for a home user this is kind of a half baked mess and the parity support is beyond awful. It actually has fantastic read speed but the write speed is just ridiculous. Since the Storage Spaces GUI shoehorns you into a very specific type of setup the only way to actually setup a storage pool with the configuration I wanted was to build the entire thing in Powershell which involved a lot of trial and error with a bit of head banging. It was possible though.
So I keep getting recommended to use Drivepool. My issue with Drivepool is it means I lose parity (which is not the end of the world) but worse I lose the benefit of RAID-5 combined drive read speed (this is a deal breaker). So my question comes down to is there anyway for Drivepool to incorporate RAID-5 /parity arrays from Windows Disk Manager or Windows Storage Spaces into the pools?
Thanks
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