Storage Spaces is the devil, and no human under any circumstance should ever use it. It's dog slow, complicated, and very opaque (hard to tell what's going on under the covers, hard to troubleshoot). Avoid avoid avoid.
*10 after trying to use it recently for something simple like Plex storage and it was the biggest PITA you have ever come across
Avoid it like the plague
I quite like my mirrored, tiered storage pool. 2x6TB Red Pros, 2x2TB Reds, 2x256GB SSDs.
Works really well, how come all the hate?
I have just built i3 based mini desktop which is 100% stable, and just works under W10
as a test bed (while I moved off Unraid) I thought I would try storage pool with 4* sata WD red's in a Silverstone USB 3 drive cage. Initially it appeared stable however;
1) Even while streaming a BR rip the drive pool / USB link would go to sleep just like that (apart from anything else its an active connection, it should never go to sleep while its being used). There are apps to resolve this, but that isn't really the point.
2) Copying over from Unraid to the drive pool was painfully slow (given I had 12TB of rips to move) - 1/3 - 1/2 of what I'm now doing at a sustained rate between the same hardware on the same network (and it wasn't Unraid causing the slowness as I proved this before taking it down) . It would also dip down to 0 mb/s far too frequently and for minutes at a time for no conceivable reason. In comparison Ive been watching a current transfer mildly change between ~80 - 86MB/s consistently for the last 20 minutes
3) Even on a relatively simple set up (very limited options available within StoragePools for parity / raid so I went with no redundancy as it was only going to be temp anyway), the actual pool itself kept on crashing and generally becoming unresponsive a random times and even within Control Panel just trying to change a setting it would often go into "not responding".
4) If you want to move files within the pool (lets say to remove one of the drives for use elsewhere / if its about to fail) there is absolutely no indication of how its progressing etc etc (and its incredibly slow given in this case it was moving files locally - well over 24hrs to move ~2tb of data)
Ive now put the server onto Xenology 5.2 on Raid 6 with two parity drives and given this (admittedly unsupported officially) is free software its just leagues ahead of the Microsoft option and reliability is incomparable.
