disregard/delete

[talion83]

Disregard - upon reviewing specifications for storage spaces it indicates that running a hardware RAID is not supported in conjunction with Storage Spaces.

 

[smitbret]

Most articles are discussing Storage Spaces as a virtual RAID meant to replace hardware RAID. I haven't been able to find much discussing using it in conjunction with a hardware RAID or how having mirrored disks on different storage devices might effect performance.

My thought being to have a local RAID then combine it with the software RAID to get a combination result, something similar to combining a RAID 1 and RAID 0 to create a RAID 10 - the difference here is it does not necessarily need to be on the same hardware.

So the question would be, what if locally we ran a stripped array on fast (10k, 15k, or SSD) storage then used a Storage Space to mirror that to a slower JBOD or network share (7.2k) and utilize a write-back cache.

The above could also be in conjunction with using tiered storage. The idea being to have fast storage locally that can do the heavy workloads, but have that mirrored to a secondary location without impacting performance of those local drives.

My question would be "Why"? Are you talking about shared network folders being mapped and used in a RAID setup? Your RAID is always going to be limited by the slowest component of your array. You would give up the speed benefit of a hardware RAID setup for.........? Given any decent hardware RAID controller, there really shouldn't be anything that Storage Spaces offers that can't be done better on a hardware RAID controller.

It sounds like you are really looking for a cache drive type setup with some kind of folder sync.