I've done lots of testing using 4 drives in various configurations and found some interesting configs which might be useful for others. Overall using powershell instead of the GUI I'm finding it's a solid solution for my needs.
- Storage pools are portable between machines
- Resilient storage spaces on disk failure (unplugging) give desktop notifications
- The Windows 10 GUI is extremely limited compared to the options available using powershell
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848643(v=wps.630).aspx
- GUI created 4 disk 2 way mirrored storage performance is the same as a single drive, the space is created with a single column (spanning)
- Powershell created 4 disk 2 way mirrored storage performance is the same as a 2 drive stripe, the space is created with 2 columns (stripping). Equivalent to raid 10 in performance
- GUI created spaces are thin provisioned, takes a performance hit when files are written and space is allocated from the pool on the fly.
- Powershell spaces can be configured with fixed provisioning, which pre-allocates space from the pool. Has a major impact on parity setups
- GUI created parity spaces have very poor performance, approx 35 mb/s writes
- Powershell created fixed provisioned parity spaces doubles performance, approx 70 mb/s writes
In summary for my 4 disk setup I could have;
- 4 disk 2 way mirror which is equivalent to raid 10, excellent performance but less space. Performance is almost 100% scaling read/write with drive number.
- 4 disk parity fixed provisioned, excellent space with OK read speeds and barely acceptable write speeds (70mb/s)
