Accelerate Storage Spaces with SSDs in Windows 10 Storage Pool tiers

Create Storage Spaces in Windows 10

Windows Server O/S contains Storage Spaces support for Server Spaces tiered storage. You can front slower spinning disks with smaller faster SSDs. Windows 10 has a Storage Spaces GUI Control Panel that does not include the tiered storage GUI. This means Powershell must be used for all configuration.

https://github.com/freemansoft/win10-storage-spaces contains scripts that create tiered storage pools that integrate SSDs as caching drives and HDDs as storage drives. They assume you have at least one SSD and one HDD.

• The scripts automatically find all raw drives and add them to the pool.
• Some HDDs have their types incorrectly identified. The script can coerce them to be MediaType:HDD
• The entire virtual drive is added to the system as a single large volume
• You need at least
  • 1 SSD and 1 HDD to run cached storage / Simple resiliency
  • 2 SSD and 2 HDD to run cached storage / Mirror resiliency /
  • 1 SSD and 2 HDD to run cached storage / Simple resiliency / striped storage (sum of HDD space)

  

Simple vs Mirror

The "Mirror" resiliency level attempts to mirror both SSD and HDD tiers so you would need 4 drives run mirror, to mirror both tiers

Scripts

new-storage-space.ps1

Creates a tiered storage pool and allocates all the disk space to a single drive

• You can change the drive letter and label by editing the variables at the top.
• the script can auto size the drive and cache. That didn't work for me so the script supports manual sizing.

remove-storage-space

Removes the virtual drive, the storage tiers and then the storage pool.

• All drives are returned the Primordial pool

Sample configuration

new-storage-space.ps created a Virtual drive from 3 physical drives

Physical Drives	Storage Space Virtual Drive
two 2TB HDD	single 3.6TB data volume striped across my two HDD
one 200GB SSD.	with a 200GB read/write cache

Win 10 Pro Storage Spaces Control Panel

The control panel does not display or manipulate tiers

Video

Meaningless Benchmark

All Storage Pool drives connected to 3Gb/s SATA. The write-back cache is not used with sequential writes over 256KB

[Read]                           *Single 2TB no cache*           *Two 2TB mirrored with 200GB cache*
Sequential 1MiB (Q=  8, T= 1):   160.497 MB/s [    153.1 IOPS]   282.983 MB/s [    269.9 IOPS]
Sequential 1MiB (Q=  1, T= 1):   156.766 MB/s [    149.5 IOPS]   254.605 MB/s [    242.8 IOPS]
    Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16):     1.748 MB/s [    426.8 IOPS]   175.272 MB/s [  42791.0 IOPS]
    Random 4KiB (Q=  1, T= 1):     0.527 MB/s [    128.7 IOPS]    21.189 MB/s [   5173.1 IOPS]

[Write]                          *Single 2TB no cache*           *Two 2TB mirrored with 200GB cache*
Sequential 1MiB (Q=  8, T= 1):   153.896 MB/s [    146.8 IOPS]   226.825 MB/s [    216.3 IOPS]
Sequential 1MiB (Q=  1, T= 1):   154.147 MB/s [    147.0 IOPS]   230.149 MB/s [    219.5 IOPS]
    Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16):     2.033 MB/s [    496.3 IOPS]   149.000 MB/s [  36377.0 IOPS]
    Random 4KiB (Q=  1, T= 1):     1.706 MB/s [    416.5 IOPS]    38.790 MB/s [   9470.2 IOPS]

Credits

• Much of the script came from this great blog by Nils Schimmelmann
• This blot is copied from the git hub repository README.md

Created 4/2020