Storage Spaces & Resiliency type

[Hurmoth]

This may have been answer, but I did a search and couldn't find anything.

I am testing Windows 8 as a replacement for Windows Home Server, since 2011 dropped Drive Extender, I thought I'd give Windows 8 a test run with Storage Spaces.

I started out with two drives in Storage Spaces and chose Two-way mirror as the Resiliency type, that worked great, so I added another drive, that worked great and then I went to four drives. One thing I noticed, however, is that I cannot seem to find how to change the Resiliency type.

Anyone know if there's a way to change that? If not, is it just a limitation of the Release Preview?

[SoapyHamHocks Member]

Maybe you just can't change it once you have created a pool?

[Hurmoth]

That's what I was thinking, but you can change everything else: the name, the drives in the pool, the size of the pool, etc. I doesn't make sense that you can't change the resiliency :/

[theyarecomingforyou]

I wanted to do a similar thing. As most of my free space was spread over several drives I added a new drive and created a storage space with no resiliency in the hope that I could move data onto it and then simply convert it to two-way mirrored later (theoretically a pretty straight-forward feature). Unfortunately I found I couldn't do that. The only thing you can do is create another storage space from the same pool with a different resiliency - if you have enough space you can copy from one storage space to another even if it uses the same drives.

However, two-way mirror is the one most people will go for. It doesn't have the write performance hit of parity, nor the reduced storage capacity of three-way mirror.

[Hurmoth]

  On 17/06/2012 at 14:48, theyarecomingforyou said:

I wanted to do a similar thing. As most of my free space was spread over several drives I added a new drive and created a storage space with no resiliency in the hope that I could move data onto it and then simply convert it to two-way mirrored later (theoretically a pretty straight-forward feature). Unfortunately I found I couldn't do that. The only thing you can do is create another storage space from the same pool with a different resiliency - if you have enough space you can copy from one storage space to another even if it uses the same drives.

However, two-way mirror is the one most people will go for. It doesn't have the write performance hit of parity, nor the reduced storage capacity of three-way mirror.

That's lame. Two-way only protects against a single hard drive crash, but what if I've added two or more drives in. The more drives, the higher the chance of more than one drive failing at the same time. Probably unlikely, but I still think they should give us the choice to change the resiliency type.

But oh well. Thanks for info :)

[theyarecomingforyou]

  On 18/06/2012 at 21:44, Hurmoth said:

That's lame. Two-way only protects against a single hard drive crash, but what if I've added two or more drives in. The more drives, the higher the chance of more than one drive failing at the same time. Probably unlikely, but I still think they should give us the choice to change the resiliency type.

It obviously depends on how much resiliency you're after. For me a two-way mirror is ideal, as I'm protected from a single hard-drive failure - I still use cloud services for critical files. In terms of being able to change resiliency type, there really isn't any good reason why you shouldn't be able to change it on the fly - you should be able to move between two and three way mirrors without issue. Moving over to parity is different as additional information is stored, so I can understand why that would be an issue.

At the end of the day it's a nice feature with some unnecessary limitations. Hopefully it will mature over time but for now it's a bit fiddly and certainly not designed for casual users.