Storage Spaces v Hardware RAID v ???

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mgbridges

92 posts

Master Geek

# 179127 27-Aug-2015 14:28

I'm building a new PC which has an SSD as system drive then a pair of 2TB hard drives for data. I was planning to mirror using RAID 1, but the question is whether I use hardware RAID (motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-H97M-D3H) or use Storage Spaces under Windows 10.

I've heard murmurs of poor performance under Storage Spaces but on the other hand hardware RAID is often harder to set up.

What is the wisdom of the crowd? Anyone used Storage Spaces under Win10?

Cheers,

Martin

Mattmannz

467 posts

Ultimate Geek

# 1375280 27-Aug-2015 16:15

One person supports this post

The hardware raid isn't true hardware raid on those boards as it requires an OS driver to work and uses the main CPU for processing. Raid 1 is very easy to setup on most machines but my experiences with these sort of hybrid cards hasn't been great, my preference is for pure hardware raid wherever possible.

JWR

785 posts

Ultimate Geek

# 1375334 27-Aug-2015 17:31

One person supports this post

I would use Storage Spaces.

- It's easier to setup and maintain.
- More flexible to extend things in the future.
- Performance will be about the same for both cases. Storage Spaces may even be quicker for RAID 1.

As Mattmannz pointed out, both are software solutions.

/edit: btw only used Storage Spaces on Server 2012. But, Microsoft must have confidence, if they put it in Server.

jhsol

92 posts

Master Geek

# 1379440 3-Sep-2015 22:52

Ive used Storage Spaces for nearly 2 years now (windows 8.1) and thats after using the integrated raid controller on Motherboards (mainly intel) for about 3-4 years.

Storage Spaces
Storage spaces has terrible performance in Raid 5 (parity set up).
Raid 0 and 1 (mirrored and striped) has ok performance (bursts around the 100-120MB/s mark)
Great for moving the drives between Windows based machines (ie take out your storage spaces HDDs and plug them into any other Win 8/.1/10 computer and Storage Spaces will work as it always has.
Parity (raid 5) is extremely slow in Storage Spaces (around the 30-40MB/s burst mark). Do not use unless its for backups of some sort. I havent tested it in Win 10 though to see if its improved.

Integrated raid controller on MB
Faster performance in Raid 0, 1, 1+0 and Raid 5 than storage spaces. Raid 0 will burst to around 150-180Mbs.
Its not a "true" hardware based raid but they usually have a chip on the MB for the raid controller but offloads the processes to the CPU.
If you change motherboards be prepared to lose your raid (and all data on the drives). I learnt the hard way going to a diff MB with a diff Storage controller chip. Lost 3TB of data.

timmmay

15571 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Subscriber

# 1379488 4-Sep-2015 07:31

I've used storage spaces for a year or so, set up as 2x4TB in a mirror. They work well. I have it set to protect both files and directory information, which I don't think is the default. I think there is some performance overhead for random reads, but all in all it works just like a regularly hard drive and is easily fast enough for both day to day computing and dealing with 1000 RAW images at a time (20GB or so of data).