Windows 10 Storage Spaces Poor Speed

Question

Using Storage Spaces under Windows 10 Pro, I am observing poor, nonsensical speed. A two-way mirror and a simple space across four drives on 2012R2 and 2016TP produce completely different performance characteristics. On my machine, they produce the same performance when benchmarked. I mean literally the exact same. As if striping over four ways is equivalent to mirroring and striping two ways.

I want storage spaces specifically because of the thin pool functionality, and the ability to have an "archive" segment of my four-drive array in parity mode (where I do not care about write speed) to achieve an effective compression of the data (N-1 versus N/2), say for movies/music which are written once and never changed.

Does consumer/workstation Windows storage space not stripe data like the server variant? Is this something I can work around by manually creating my spaces in powershell and setting columns accordingly?

Solution

If created via the GUI then no, Windows 10 does not stripe simple spaces.

In powershell type get-virtualdisk |fl and check number of columns.

The Storage Spaces GUI in Win10 is very limited and if you create a storage space using it, it will choose default values which may not suit your intended scenario. Use powershell to manually create storage spaces.

Comments

[David Schwartz]

Read speed should be equivalent. Why wouldn't it be?

[Arthur Kay]

On a four-drive RAID0 versus a RAID10? On a fully optimized solution it would be (I'm not sure if SS stripes reads), however everything is the same (including the writes) and the raw numbers are not RAID-tier. As a test I created two 2-way mirror spaces and software RAID-0'd them with the disk management MMC. That should only decrease performance since SS should already be striping ... but in fact it doubled my performance.

[Arthur Kay]

Then I bet it doesn't stripe two-way mirrors either. F&*% Microsoft decisions. Gonna re-create my spaces with PS as stripes instead of spans I guess.

[Arthur Kay]

Yep, single column for my "RAID10" and "RAID0." Guess I'm gonna fix that.

[Cerlancism]

@Arthur Kay For 2 way mirror with Powershell, it also does not do read striping.