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How Robust is Storage Spaces?

PCDoc Storage Spaces Warning

PCDoc woke up to the sound of an alarm, the alarm from his Highpoint RAID card, which was highlighting an error within Storage Spaces. With an option to repair chkdsk was run:

…it ran a check disk on all three drives and found no errors.  Shortly after that it began a repair process which took many hours to complete.  When it was complete it still did not tell me anything other than it was completed (not much help). 

Had this been a production system, I would not be able to identity which drive in the system is causing the problem.  Even if it flagged a drive as bad, there does seem to be anyway to track that back to a specific controller port or drive location.  Second, the unexplainable reason for the rebuild in the first place.  What caused it and why?  They should tell me something.  Lastly, since this has only been running for a bout 10 days, the robustness of storage spaces is now a big concern to me.  I have never seen this happen in two years of running RAID 24/7.  This might be a fluke, however it throws doubt for me as to how stable and robust this really is. 

You can read PCDoc’s article here.

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Comments (4)

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  1. Ceetee says:

    this is interesting. I put server 2012 essentials on my box a week ago. While setting up the storage space, I noticed immediately that I couldn’t see which drive was which (i.e. which physical drive I would need to swap out if one of the pooled drives failed)… the article basically confirms my fears… If a drive goes down, you have no idea which one it is! oh dear. I don’t know what’s wrong over at Microsoft these days, they appear to have a directive to break everything they produce.

  2. Carlton says:

    WHS v1 has the same problem with drives connected to RAID cards (JBOD pass-through mode.) Luckily the Disk Management Add-in provides the additional information needed to identify the corresponding SATA port on the RAID card.

    I frequently have similar issues with WHS v1. I’ll get file conflict errors, but no indication as to why, which disk was at fault, or how to resolve. So I run a chkdisk and hope that resolves something, and when it doesn’t, I restore from a separate backup.

    I was hoping Essentials 2012 would overcome this problem, but it appears this may not be the case. A Synology NAS is looking more and more likely.

  3. Matthew Flook says:

    He’s running a BETA OS. How about waiting for RTM before scaring people into thinking they need to “wait for SP1”?

    Not mentioning the beta nature of what you’re experiencing in an article like this is simply irresponsible.

    • Ceetee says:

      it isn’t a beta, the version is a release candidate. The clue is in the name. A feature as massive as storage spaces is not going to change before RTM. you maybe get a few typo fixes and 3 icons. Your naivety is more concerning than the lack of “beta” tag

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