Data Recovery Weekly

Today we have done Storage Spaces recovery of a live data using a prototype of ReclaiMe Storage Spaces Recovery. Most likely we are the first in the world who were able to do this. Our client has a computer consisting of 5 hard disks on which he created Storage Spaces volumes - parity, simple and mirror. A month later the pool failed and the client lost the whole archive of family photos. He asked Microsoft to help, but it didn't bring any good. Then he found us and we decided to try to test our prototype on a real thing. The prototype gave good results both in recovery quality and in performance. Recovery took about two days on the computer with two processors and 6 GB memory. So, we congratulate ourselves and the client on the world's first successful Storage Spaces recovery.

At this moment, the situation with the software prototype is as follows: S can and analysis of four 2 TB disks on the machine with two CPUs take a day to complete and require 6 GB of memory. Adding two more processors can probably speed the process by the factor of 1.5. Although the prototype can successfully recover Storage Spaces configuration on small sized LUNs (approx. 16 GB per LUN), it yet cannot cope with the large LUNs. The prototype is capable of recovering only Storage Spaces volumes with NTFS; as for ReFS, this is still to be implemented.

Based on the first real-world test of ReclaiMe Storage Spaces Recovery we found out that Storage Spaces recovery is generally limited by CPU power rather than memory and disk throughput. Thus, new projected system requirements look like this: no less than 512 MB RAM per disk although there is no minimum CPU limit, it is desirable to have one core per each two disks. While the number of processor cores is less than half the number of disks, adding cores increases performance linearly. We know definitely that if the number of processor cores is equal to the number of disks, adding cores no longer makes sense. In the intermediate case, when one core handles two or less disks, it is impossible to accurately predict what the performance will be in terms of speed gain. S o the system with four cores and 8 GB of memory should cover most needs. In other words, you can still get away with some high-end desktop hardware.