The Podcast for the Home Server Enthusiast.

Storage Spaces Performance–Server 2012

pcdoc • June 18, 2012 • Comments (0)

Back in March of the this year I spent some time testing Storage Spaces on the Server 8 Beta, along with the Storage Spaces in Windows 8. As you can see from my prior articles, I was not too impressed with the performance in the earlier versions. Now that they have released new versions, I was excited to see if they had improved the performance.

Prior Articles for comparison

http://thedocsworld.net/exploring-storage-spaces-in-server-8/

http://thedocsworld.net/storage-spaces-the-verdict-for-now/

Basic walk through for setting up a parity volume

They have made several changes in the interface for this version. Below is pictorial walkthrough the entire process in case you have not seen this before. The process for Server 2012 is different than Windows 8 as the technology is a litlle different. That said, once a volume is created, it is readable by either Server 2012 or Windows 8.

Results/Summary

Below are the results I got using the most current version. As you can see from the benchmarks most of the results went up, and overall it felt fast and responsive when copying files to it. The large file copy was sort of a compromise. Prior results started faster but tanked 3/4 of the way through. This time the spike was much shorter but the overall was higher and more consistent than the beta version. CrystalDiskMark had a lower peak read performance but overall writes was faster. In short I think they have improved the performance over the beta version for the typical use case. Honestly although I find it very flexible, and the improvements in the interface are nice, I still do not see this replacing hardware RAID solutions for heavy use. If they port this over to SBS or WHS, it would provide a great solution for an easy expandable storage solution with decent performance.