Storage Spaces seriously slow (6-10mb write speed)

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gbwelly

1243 posts

Uber Geek

#2263174 24-Jun-2019 09:08

CokemonZ:

So after shuffling a couple of drives around I have found the issue with storage spaces behaving weirdly.

One of the new sata cables I put in was dodgy, which was causing drive write failure attempts on one drive.

Who would have thought.

Anyway - thanks for everyones help - today - storage spaces, tomorrow (or when I get a couple of days off and want a project) Unraid.

So what is your final configuration and performance? Did you leave it configured as 'battery backed'?

CokemonZ

1051 posts

Uber Geek

#2263314 24-Jun-2019 12:17

Still moving data as we speak, but will end up at a 6 drive Parity Storage Space.

With 3 drives getting reasonably consistently getting 25 - 30mb write speed.

It can be a little peaks and troughs, but much much faster.

And yes - setting is that it's battery backed.

CokemonZ

1051 posts

Uber Geek

#2264072 25-Jun-2019 14:10

So after a 4TB copy - Teracopy says average speed is 21MB/s with 3 drives.

Just added a 4th, and setting up a 3TB copy.

CokemonZ

1051 posts

Uber Geek

#2267331 30-Jun-2019 15:16

After getting my hopes up I have had them dashed again.

I was getting 20mb + writes and 60MB+ reads.

Now I am getting about 10% of that and have been for 3 days. My new strategy is bugger this for a laugh - I am going back to physical drives.

It should be easier to move to unraid later on if I do that as well.

CokemonZ

1051 posts

Uber Geek

#2270459 5-Jul-2019 12:54

And further to all this it may be the drives I am using. It turns out the are SMR drives which and have some write performance issues under sustained writes.

So yeah - fun times to be had by all.

Thanks Anandtech for pointing this out https://www.anandtech.com/show/14539/seagate-backup-plus-portable-5tb-backup-plus-slim-2tb-review-portable-smr

I will say from a general plex server style drive, these do very well. I am 100% satisfied overall with these drives, I am however extremely dissatisfied with how finicky storage spaces was and how difficult this whole experience has been to troubleshoot.

The fact these are smr drives and do have issues with writes like this does make me wonder what performance will be like under unraid as well.

infused

65 posts

Master Geek

#2363339 30-Nov-2019 09:35

Hi Guys.

I wrote that article and others on Storage Spaces.

Just a heads up - storage spaces needs to be configured correctly otherwise you will have very poor speed. I've just come across this thread when I was setting up another storage space server on a low end box and saw how many people were having issues still.

Most of this needs to be done via powershell as the GUI uses default (and somewhat stupid) options

Lets dive into it shall we?

For low end boxes like most of you are configuring this on (no disrespect, but with out SSD tiering they will always perform low end) you need to check a few things.

Logical Size

Make sure your physical size and logical size match. Use powershell to see:

PS C:\Users\Administrator> get-virtualdisk | select physicalsectorsize, logicalsectorsize

physicalsectorsize logicalsectorsize
------------------ -----------------
4096 4096

This is done when you create your storage pool.

New-StoragePool -FriendlyName Store -LogicalSectorSizeDefault 4096 -PhysicalDisks $PhysicalDisk

If you don't match your logical and physical you will get up to 8x write penalty in some cases.

Virtual Disk Parity

Now that the logical units are sorted, you need to create your virtual disk. If you use the GUI and do parity, you will get double party which will have a massive write impact (raid6). The way to get around this is to specify the number of redundant disks.

new-virtualdisk -StoragePoolName Store -UseMaximumSize -FriendlyName Data -ResiliencySettingName Parity -PhysicalDiskRedundancy 1

This will give you a raid5. It's not pretty, but for a Raid6 which is the default config, you are getting a massive write penalty. It works fine if you have SSD tiering. Without them, not so much.

Finally, turn on battery backed.

Set-StoragePool -FriendlyName Store -IsPowerProtected $true

On WD-RED Pro's I get a constant 110 MB/s sustained write.

Hope this helps.

CokemonZ

1051 posts

Uber Geek

#2368160 4-Dec-2019 15:19

infused:

Hi Guys.

I wrote that article and others on Storage Spaces.

Just a heads up - storage spaces needs to be configured correctly otherwise you will have very poor speed. I've just come across this thread when I was setting up another storage space server on a low end box and saw how many people were having issues still.

Most of this needs to be done via powershell as the GUI uses default (and somewhat stupid) options

Lets dive into it shall we?

For low end boxes like most of you are configuring this on (no disrespect, but with out SSD tiering they will always perform low end) you need to check a few things.

Logical Size

Make sure your physical size and logical size match. Use powershell to see:

PS C:\Users\Administrator> get-virtualdisk | select physicalsectorsize, logicalsectorsize

physicalsectorsize logicalsectorsize
------------------ -----------------
4096 4096

This is done when you create your storage pool.

New-StoragePool -FriendlyName Store -LogicalSectorSizeDefault 4096 -PhysicalDisks $PhysicalDisk

If you don't match your logical and physical you will get up to 8x write penalty in some cases.

Virtual Disk Parity

Now that the logical units are sorted, you need to create your virtual disk. If you use the GUI and do parity, you will get double party which will have a massive write impact (raid6). The way to get around this is to specify the number of redundant disks.

new-virtualdisk -StoragePoolName Store -UseMaximumSize -FriendlyName Data -ResiliencySettingName Parity -PhysicalDiskRedundancy 1

This will give you a raid5. It's not pretty, but for a Raid6 which is the default config, you are getting a massive write penalty. It works fine if you have SSD tiering. Without them, not so much.

Finally, turn on battery backed.

Set-StoragePool -FriendlyName Store -IsPowerProtected $true

On WD-RED Pro's I get a constant 110 MB/s sustained write.

Hope this helps.

Super interesting. Thank you for writing those blogs, they were a huge help!

I definitely have different logical and physical sector size and can't appear to change those.

I have also recently had issues with the storage controller I was using which could have been the issue.

But now my 10tb external is being used for backups so I'm still stuck without buying more. Storage spaces seems to be just too enterprise for me - when I do a project on it I will probably give unraid a go.

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davidcole

6034 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#2368211 4-Dec-2019 16:33

Could look at drivebender. I find it better than storage spaces for configuration. But unlike SS it’s not free. But it’s pretty cheap, Less than unraid I believe .

Previously known as psycik

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CokemonZ

1051 posts

Uber Geek

#2369507 6-Dec-2019 11:19

davidcole: Could look at drivebender. I find it better than storage spaces for configuration. But unlike SS it’s not free. But it’s pretty cheap, Less than unraid I believe .

Ok - I've had a look and it actually looks great. I especially like the way it is basically just storing files, so you can view it from another device if it all goes pear shaped.

From a deployment experience:

Can I install it on my existing drives and 'move' the files that are on them into the drivebender drive?

Will that work or just be super slow and horrible.

CokemonZ

1051 posts

Uber Geek

#2733768 24-Jun-2021 13:37

New thread - I've moved to unraid and it's legit! Unraid Backup - used to use backblaze, but doesn't work anymore (geekzone.co.nz)

Had some performance issues when moving data over assume due to SMR drives, but nothing compared to storage spaces.

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