Hardware and Storage Spaces

Sadly the predictions about people using sub-par hardware to build enormous Storage Spaces configs are gradually coming true. Not that the hardware is bad or faulty per se. It is not just up to the task. Any large storage configuration, except maybe some network-based distributed systems (which are designed to be slow, by the way), requires stable hardware. Even a drive failure rate of one failure per year per drive would still be acceptable. On the disk set of ten or more drives, one failure per drive-year is an annoyance, but one can still expect the system to be able to cope. However, in what we are looking at now, with USB configurations of forty drives or larger, the failure rates are closer to one failure per drive per week. This results in systems where the lifetime expectancy is comparable to the time needed to populate the system with the initial data set. Once the data is copied over, original copy deleted, and original drives reused, whatever lifetime left in Storage Space runs out and it goes down.

If you want a storage larger than your typical desktop, say, 10 TB or more, there is still no way around the expensive hardware. A large pile of USB external drives from the corner store just does not last long enough.