RAID / Storage spaces?

[The_Potty_1]

Hi

I've got a pretty low-end desktop at work, and a similar box at home. Both are running windows ten, and have 500Gb disk drives.

When windows starts up, my drive typically runs at 100% for some time, and the computer is unresponsive. I suspect that windows silently defragments your drives, because I once found a thread that described how to defragment under W10, and it turned out my drive was already perfectly unfragmented.

Anyway, I noticed that Windows has a built-in software-based RAID system, called Storage spaces. Has anyone tried it? Yes I know a hardware controller is probably better, and I saw a cheap one for R500 here:

https://www.wootware.co.za/sunix-ac...a3-6gb-s-dual-port-pci-e-raid-controller.html

However, my work is super cheap, as it is I'm scratching around for spare hard drives. Yes I know SSD, but not gonna happen.

I generally format my drives in two partitions, so I can re-install the OS and leave my data in place. Yes backups are elsewhere. Windows on C, data on D, both around 250Gb.

So I was thinking, for work, if I stick in two 250Gb drives, I can either mirror or stripe my existing drives, either way I should get a performance boost? Any thoughts which?

Striping (‘Simple (no resiliency)’ in Storage spaces) is probably for gamers and adrenalin junkies, and I qualify either way. All data is spread across all available drives. Data reading and writing is faster, but if any drive fails, you lose data, or even have to re-install your OS.

Mirroring (‘Two-way Mirror’ in Storage spaces) is way safer, and read performance is good. Write performance is ..? What? OK? Better or worse than a single drive?

For home, I may spring for the RAID controller, and actually buy a drive to go with it. Actually, that raises a question, if I buy a 1Tb drive, will the raid controller format it to match the 500Gb drive, and not allow me to use the other 500Gb?

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

Yes I know a hardware controller is probably better, and I saw a cheap one for R500 here:

https://www.wootware.co.za/sunix-ac...a3-6gb-s-dual-port-pci-e-raid-controller.html

However, my work is super cheap, as it is I'm scratching around for spare hard drives. Yes I know SSD, but not gonna happen.

You know you can get an SSD for less than or the same price as that card right?

Something like this would be better than any raid solution for your OS drive: https://www.takealot.com/teamgroup-120gb-2-5-sata-l5-site-ssd-hard-drive/PLID50012840

While 120GB might not be ideal you can fit Windows on there and put the rest of your stuff on the spinning rust.

 

[WAslayer]

If you are willing to buy the raid controller and a 1TB HDD for home, you may as well just get a proper SSD for home for the same money as the controller and 1TB HDD.. https://www.wootware.co.za/crucial-...50gb-sata-2-5-internal-solid-state-drive.html

At work, you can stick to RAID then.. I have not used Storage Spaces, though I imagine that the RAID works in the same way as traditional RAID does, so for mirror you can expect the following:

Mirror:
Provides redundancy in the event that one drive is lost and you get an improve in read speeds, but writes are the same as the slowest write speed from all the drives in your array. Data is in essence mirrored across both drives, which provides redundancy..

If you need writes for work, stripe away, but backup your data.. Otherwise you should be happy with the increase in read performance of the mirror..

 

[The_Potty_1]

Baha, I'm put off any SSD smaller than 250Gb, it's probably old tech and/or stock, I wouldn't touch it. Yes the 250Gb ones are reasonable, but I'm a typical late-adopter, so I was still letting them mature. That said, you do have a point, the new ones probably are mature enough.

https://www.takealot.com/wd-green-240gb-2-5-sata-ssd/PLID47901567
https://www.wootware.co.za/mushkin-...-3d-tlc-sata-6gb-s-2-5-solid-state-drive.html

I did put a request through for a SSD and some more RAM at work, but I'm still waiting, so the RAID is a stopgap measure. However, I think a SSD for home would be perfect

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

Baha, I'm put off any SSD smaller than 250Gb, it's probably old tech and/or stock, I wouldn't touch it. Yes the 250Gb ones are reasonable, but I'm a typical late-adopter, so I was still letting them mature. That said, you do have a point, the new ones probably are mature enough.

https://www.takealot.com/wd-green-240gb-2-5-sata-ssd/PLID47901567
https://www.wootware.co.za/mushkin-...-3d-tlc-sata-6gb-s-2-5-solid-state-drive.html

I did put a request through for a SSD and some more RAM at work, but I'm still waiting, so the RAID is a stopgap measure. However, I think a SSD for home would be perfect

I'm like an SSD evangelist, I cannot stress enough how much it will improve your life if you're coming from a regular hard drive

 

[The_Potty_1]

Well I've ordered that 240gb SSD from takealot for my home pc, it turns out my home drive is formatted to a single 500gb partition, so I'll have to shrink it before I can image it and copy the os over, but I don't expect any trouble.

For my work PC, I booted up a stack of hard drives using a linux cd, I got a 7200rpm 320Gb out of it, the rest were useless. A 250Gb had bad sectors and made a clicking noise, a 500Gb laptop drive was only 5400 rpm, and the rest were 80GB or worse.

Now I'm trying to mirror my system drive, and some hand-holding would be nice

I right clicked the C partition, and selected 'Add mirror'. I selected disk 1 as the mirror drive, and it threw up the following warning: "The operation you selected will convert the selected basic disk(s) to dynamic disk(s). If you convert the disk(s) to dynamic, you will not be able to start installed operation systems from any volume on the disk(s) (except the current boot volume). Are you sure you want to continue?".

I think it means I can only run one OS, so no dual booting, which is totally fine. In hindsight I probably should have said yes. I said no. Now when I do the same thing, It throws up the following:


Do I need to partition disk 1? How do I make the partition the same size as my boot partition?

 

[SauRoNZA]

If your problem is 100% Disk I/O now....it will be even worse under Storage Spaces.

More so when a drive goes faulty but Storage Spaces isn't aware of it and tries to copy **** constantly the whole time.

 

[The_Potty_1]

Ouch. Well if it's worse, I'll just remove the mirror and go back to what I have now. I don't expect windows will fail to notice a drive tanking.

So, I figured out the how, but I'd like some confirmation that this will not stop my system from booting, or something?

 

[The_Potty_1]

Oh. Yeah nope, you cannot change a disk to dynamic while it has a bootable partition on it. So I could do this, but I'd have to format everything, and re-install the os. I just did that (twice) at the beginning of the year, so nope nope nope.

 

[The_Potty_1]

Well my upgrades are done, here's how it went.

My home computer's a Pentium G3220 that scores 3155 on passmark. I got that when money was tight. The following year I had twice the budget, so I bought a Xeon E3 that scores 7758. I told my daughter she could have either, but the G3220 had windows ten, while the Xeon had linux. I assumed she'd stick to windows, but she did a creditable Jeremy Clarkson impression, and took the Xeon.

The G3220 came with 4Gb ram, I added another 8Gb when I bought the Xeon, so it had 12. I also bought two Radeon RX 550s, one for each computer. It turned out that while my daughter's screen had a HDMI port, mine only had VGA, so my RX550's been sitting in a cupboard for a year.

My work computer's an ageing 2012 Core i3 with 4Gb ram, processor scores 4310 on passmark. I'd previously stuck an old GT 710 in it from home.

So, first off, I bought a 22" screen with a HDMI port. Sweet, and I have to say, adding a dedicated video card boosted the general speed of this computer noticeably.

I also bought a new 4Gb ram slice, downgraded home to the single 8Gb, and put the two 4Gbs in my work computer. Which also improved things a lot. The two old 2Gb slices I stuck in the file and SQL server at work.

The last thing I bought, (apart from the LAN upgrades) was the SSD for home. Which I threw in a cupboard, because I'm a bit slack, and the computer was way better just with the video card upgrade.

My daughter in the interim had wrangled a windows ten license, but it had recently started bluescreening. We did the normal repair things, and booted from linux to test the drive, finally she formatted and re-installed windows from the latest iso off the microsoft site. She says it's still tanking, so this morning I stuck the SSD in there, and she's installing onto that.

I'm inclined to think it's not the drive, she's only got 8Gb, so perhaps source filmmaker is running out of memory or something, but I was probably never going to get round to using the SSD, so it's all good. Next year another 8Gb each, and my son's laptop's gonna need replacing too. I think he's seen the light, and has gone off laptops, which suck to upgrade.