Saturday, November 22, 2014

Microsoft Storage Spaces for Desktop Benchmarked

After NAS mirror upgrade I ended up with two spare Barracuda 7200.14 hard drives.  Given that I am running out of space on my video editing workstation, the choice was clear.  Would be nice though if I could use those in a mirror - to make sure things are fast and tolerate hard drive failure.  I just learned about Microsoft Storage Spaces and throught I would give it and ReFS a try.

I compared I/O performance of three drives:
  • Kingston SSDNow V300 Series SV300S37A/120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III SSD - just because it was already there.
  • Single hard drive - 2861589GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 (AF) ST3000DM001-1E6166 
  • A Microsoft Windows 8.1 Storage Space with two of the above hard drives configured as mirror.
Here is what I measured using CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64:



MB/sIOPSMB/sIOPSMB/sIOPSDelta
Sequential Read:446.836
140.259
181.808
22.85%
Sequential Write:144.154
137.572
125.443
-8.82%
Random Read 512KB:404.102
50.204
39.758
-20.81%
Random Write 512KB:144.021
82.208
66.927
-18.59%
Random Read 4KB (QD=1):22.6665533.80.38694.30.449109.614.03%
Random Write 4KB (QD=1):108.64426524.56.9316920.38293.2-94.49%
Random Read 4KB (QD=32):116.62128471.90.468114.30.456111.2-2.56%
Random Write 4KB (QD=32):141.82434624.90.983239.90.38493.7-60.94%

SSD1x Barracuda 7200.142x Barracuda 7200.14

Transition to storage spaces mirror moderately improves sequential read speed.  Random write performance however is dramatically deteriorated.  For a workstation use scenario this makes storage spaces unacceptable for me.  They may still be relevant for servers.

So I will be sticking with two single hard drives.  Maybe will use synchtoy to backup one drive to another.

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