Storage Spaces, Striped Volume, Spanned Volume?

enigma27

enigma27

enigma27

Associate
Joined
3 Jun 2007
Posts
2,284
Location
Essex
Hi All.

Had to do a complete re install of windows last night and got me thinking about how to handle my storage on this new install.

I used to have 4 SSD and 1 HDD all separate under their own drive letter.

I started to look into ways of combining the storage area I have on the SSD's and came across the different ways it could be done as per the title. For clarity I have one SSD with windows (wont change) and three SSD that simply hold Game installs (one for steam, one for Origin and one for other games)

My question is what way of doing it would be the best and is there any performance impact on the drives themselves? from my reading I understand the following

Spanned Volume:

Uses each drive in sequential order, therefore is one drive fails that is not yet been used you wont loose data on the other drives.

Striped Volume:

Data is written across all drives and you can only use the total drive volume if each drive is the same size?

Storage spaces:

This one is new to me... it sounds like Striped volume but drive size does not matter?
Also I have read about REFS file type which you can use when setting up storage spaces.. what would be the benefit if any and would there be any comparability problems?

My plan is to install the likes of Steam, origin, GOG on the windows drive then just install the games to the large volume of the SSD.

the whole volume will be backed up to a 2tb hard drive I have connected via USB3

Thanks in advance.
 
I've been playing about with ReFS and Storage Spaces tonight for saving my video files to. Having managed to completely wipe one drive because I clicked the wrong option (all the 1000+ files on there are gone and unrecoverable), I seem to have it set up to my liking now.

I've got 2x1TB external USB drives in a storage pool with 1.81GB of space. It's set up in storage spaces as a two-way mirror so 931GB space available but the files are copied to both drives simultaneously.

You probably just want to set it up the same as I did with the two drives (SSD + ex USB) in a two way mirror. With ReFS it's supposed to correct any errors as they occur in realtime so in theory with ReFS and two HDDs, your data will never get corrupt. I have no info on compatibility or performance for you though.

EDIT: I've just re-read the post above. I'm not sure how you would combine three SSDs into one volume and then mirror that on to the external drive. :( It might be exactly the same procedure - storage spaces might auto configure the SSDs and the HDD so they have equal space and then mirror things automatically.
 
just tried storage spaces and it gives me an error... tried spanning three drives and worked fine.. not sure why it wouldnt work
 
enigma27 said:
just tried storage spaces and it gives me an error... tried spanning three drives and worked fine.. not sure why it wouldnt work
Click to expand...

Had an error at first here. It would only add one of the two drives. Guess what that was - it didn't like one of the USB cables. Even though I've been using the drive for years with Windows, storage spaces didn't like the cable. Tried another one and it worked straightaway.
 
Just simply used my 3 SSD.. not to worried about redundancy as they are just for installing games onto and have the folders backeup up onto a 2tb portable storage drive

RFTKxfv.png
 
Mine had a funny half hour on startup today. Storage spaces said there was an issue and went about repairing the drives. Dunno what caused the problem but the repair was completed and the videos still play. Doesn't instil much confidence in me though.

EDIT: I wonder if it was caused by me plugging in one USB drive at a time instead of starting the PC with them both connected.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom