I've been using DriveBender for a while now, and before that WHS v1 for pooling disparate sized drives into large pools and offering folder redundancy by mirroring folders between physical drives.

After a recent bout where the machine was bsod'ing daily, I finally pinned it to a bad 4tb drive that now has had a drive scan and been removed from the pool ready for RMA.

But it got me to thinking about other options.  I'm not totally wed to windows 2012 (only as it doesn't allow for some software to run - eg backblaze - as it wont run on server os), but am very tied to Hyper-V and I do prefer windows over linux....that said I run 3 linux VMs for various tasks.

So what are my options.  I can run individual drives, or try storage spaces.  I'd like to keep a large proportion of folders replicated - preferably in real time.  Can storage spaces do this?  or since I have 3 3TB drives and 1 4 TB, should I mirror the 3s to 3tb of protected storage and use the extra 3 and 4 for unprotected (backups and VM storage).

Thoughts?