Best storage spaces alternative?

[glugglug]

I was looking forward to the storage spaces feature of Windows 8, but reviews all seem to indicate that the performance of it sucks and it is not so stable.


What is the best cheap storage pooling software out now? Preferably something that keeps individual files still readable without it installed, just maybe without the directory structure. Like what Windows Home Server used to do. I'm thinking StableBit DrivePool is going to be my best bet, but does anyone have a better recommendation?

 

[aigomorla]

a FreeBSD NAS on ZFS format.

however now were getting away from windows... as windows kinda sucks in things like this.
ReFS hasnt won me over yet.
Like you ive heard more nightmares then actually success stories.

 

[Doomer]

Don't go with Drivebender, they will screw you with their overly aggressive anti-piracy "feature". I had an issue that required them to rest my license several times and it was a royal PITA that cost me valuable time. In the end I decided to trash it and move on. No way I would recommend them to anyone.

 

[DavidT99]

Take a look at FlexRAID.

Www.flexraid.com

 

[lsv]

Take a look at FlexRAID.

Www.flexraid.com

+1 for Flexraid, however it is worthwhile to see this comparison which the snapraid guy has on his site.

I'll actually be using Flexraid in my production box which will provide an NFS share for storage and my VMs.

Regards,

Lsv

 

[glugglug]

FlexRAID is another I am definitely considering besides DrivePool. How are they both performance-wise? Worst case scenario for me will probably be recording 6 TV shows (@ 15mbps each) while comskip scans those same files for commercials ~10 minutes behind what is being written, and 2 other files are being read/streamed.

I was thinking the parity would kill write performance (much more so more so than mirroring because it would require reading what was there first to calculate new parity values), but looking further I see FlexRAID parity calc is delayed rather than real-time? How does the snapshotting interact with something like the built in Windows disk defragging? (Does a defrag cause the parity data to become temporarily invalid? Or is the parity data actually files, with some kind of database saying what files use which parts of the parity data, rather than the parity being only aware of disk blocks?

I also like that DrivePool will tell me the serial # of a failed drive, making it easy to identify which one to replace. Does FlexRAID do something similar to this? Should I be labeling all the drives for easy identification later before adding them to the pool?

 

[smakme7757]

I have no idea why they are claiming performance sucks. I see this everywhere, but my implementation doesn't perform badly at all.

I'm running a Hyper-V server and I have all my drives organized using storage spaces and the performance is more than good enough.

Here is a 4x WD RE4 1TB Mirror RAID (RAID 10) with storage spaces. There are 5 different VMs running on it and it's 45% full of data and here is the ATTO result

Of course the numbers are higher if the drives were clean without any running VMs on them, but that's not poor performance for disks that are currently in use and full of data.