Dynamic disk or Storage Spaces?

Question

I recently upgraded to windows 2012 server and am curious about the difference between storage spaces and simply creating a dynamic volume from the three drives. Basically, I have 3 hard drives I'd like to pool together to act as one. I already use a cloud backup on top of this so I don't need to have failover - I just want to have it appear as one volume.

So, what are the differences and when should I use each?

Solution

I would highly recommend not using Storage Spaces yet. They're a good idea, but the implementation is faulty. The default is to have all disks made Manually Attach (meaning you have to attach them every time you reboot), and that setting has to be changed in powershell, not the GUI. Also, the speed. If you have a Parity pool, it will be much slower (in my experience, 1/2 the speed of a similarly configured soft-RAID).

I have tried it for a few months in different configurations, and I'm going to go back to a software RAID for now (home lab, not in production). Given the option, though, a hardware raid is still the best answer for directly attached storage.