Data Recovery Weekly

Came across this, admittedly old, discussion about Storage Spaces http://www.eightforums.com/general-support/15887-storage-spaces-questions.html The fun starts at around post #4, with a real good piece of advice - your setting up a large drive system, read a LOT before committing your data to it for good. Then the discussion touches the Drive Extender briefly. Storage Spaces is not Drive Extender . Indeed it is not. Storage Spaces is arguably more fragile, and undoubtedly Storage Spaces is more difficult to recover once failed. Way more difficult, I'd venture to say. Then, around post #8, virtual machines come up. The common misconception is that recovery from storage system failures can be practiced with virtual machines. You'd better not. Virtual machines are good for modeling and training some normal operations of a storage system, but they are abysmal in reproducing storage behavior in failures. In a virtual machine, all hardware is fail-stop. You cannot simulate b...

People who want to get back Drive Extender instead of Storage Spaces usually test Storage Spaces using a parity layout. Then they complain that there is no rebalancing, speed is low, and all in the same spirit. However, with all of this testing they forget that Drive Extender operates on the file level and therefore the parity is out of question. Test Storage Spaces on the mirror or simple layouts and you will get better results than in case of Drive Extender.