Home workstation storage - Intel RST or Microsoft Storage Spaces?

[Franzi]

Hey guys,

i'm upgrading the storage of my workstation with 2 new 6TB HDD's (Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4) and i'm not sure what solution to use for mirroring. In the past I have always been using the onboard Intel RST RAID, in both RAID0 or RAID1 arrays.

It worked ok most of the time but I also had a lot of troubles like the array would break up after BIOS updates and the RST drivers can cause all kind of problems. Now with Windows 10 the RST situation seems to be worse, the latest 14.x drivers causes system lags, freezes, BSOD's. I had it happen to me too, my whole system locked up when HWiNFO64 queued the storage driver. The older 13.x driver Windows 10 is shipping with is not freezing up but causing weird slowdowns when I would see 100% disk usage just from opening a folder with 10-12 mp4 files. The attached disks are fine.

Long story short I am looking for a different storage solution and a real hardware RAID controller is probably too expensive and overkill for my needs. Anyone has experience with Windows Storage Spaces? On the paper the features look amazing. A RAID1/Mirror together with the new ReFS seems to be the way to go.

Performance wise I expect both to be very close Intel RST not being a real hardware RAID either. Windows Storage Spaces wouldn't have all the problems Intel RST has but possibly introduce others.

Any suggestions?

Many thanks in advance.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Although I haven't personally used storage spaces, windows software RAID is well-developed, and I'm biased towards software RAID if available over even "real" hardware RAID, much less motherboard/fake RAID.

I think storage spaces is the way to go.

 

[smitbret]

Although I haven't personally used storage spaces, windows software RAID is well-developed, and I'm biased towards software RAID if available over even "real" hardware RAID, much less motherboard/fake RAID.

I think storage spaces is the way to go.

I'm with Essence of War. Unless you have a specific need for Hardware RAID, it is complete overkill for home use. There are too many options that work well enough for home use:

FlexRAID
SnapRAID
unRAID
FreeNAS
NAS4Free
Drive Pool
Storage Spaces
Software RAID on motherboard or Adapter card

They're all pretty easy to set up for anyone that has built a PC or two and options like FreeNAS (or any other ZFS setup) can be really, really fast and robust. Other software options like FlexRAID, SnapRAID and unRAID offer a whole additional set of features and security that isn't even matched by hardware RAID.

 

[Franzi]

Thanks for the input, its much appreciated.

I went with Microsoft Storage Spaces and created a 2 way Mirror with ReFS as filesystem since it was designed specifically to work with Storage Space Mirrors. So far everythings working fine and I have the feeling this is a much better solution than Intel's or even a real HW RAID in my case.

Kind regards

 

[Essence_of_War]

Glad to hear that set-up was easy!