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[marko]

I stumbled across storage spaces in the Windows 8.1 control panel this evening and my curiosity is definitely piqued.

DriveBender has been pretty rock solid for me, with the only negative being a lack of volume shadow support.

Is anyone using this for their media storage?
Does anyone know how this stacks up against DriveBender?

-marko

[InflatableMouse]

I would forget about that very quickly ...

For starters, I thought it was quite complex and confusing to setup.

There are quite a bit of problems with Storage Spaces too - a quick google will reveal a whole new hell to you. Dissapearing pools, disapearing disks, disks going offline for no appearent reason, sync issues.

Disks are not compatible with any other system so you're basically limited to your own system - I don't know what would happen if you unplug all your disks, run to your neighbor (with Windows and hook them up but I fear its not going to be that easy.

When I dabbled with Storage Spaces I unplugged the power to a disk. The disk went offline - obviously - but it took a few minutes for it to show in Windows Management tool. I was sitting there refreshing the window, closed it, opened it, it wouldn't show the disk offline! I had event viewer open and almost immediately I got a warning or error (dont remember exactly) but in the management tool for storage spaces it took a minute or two. Same when I plugged another disk in - it took a while to pick that up too. IIRC it wasn't very straightforward to replace the failed disk with the new one.

Besides these quirks its actually quite slow too.

Maybe someone else has a more positive view but personally I wouldn't trade something proven reliable (drive bender) for this relatively complex system.

[jmone]

Unless they fixed it recently, you can't even play a DVD Structure from Storage Spaces.  It just fails.

[mojave]

Here is an article I found interesting on Storage Spaces:

Windows Storage Spaces and ReFS: Is it time to ditch RAID for good?

[marko]

That's the one (only one) I read. He states he can whip a drive out of a pool, plug it into a windows 8 machine and it reads the data. Overall, he seemed quite positive about it.

I'll stick with DriveBender for now and keep an eye open for an opportunity to test this out without shuffling terrabytes of data around in order to do so.

InflatableMouse, how's the beta testing going in regards to VSS support... any news?

[InflatableMouse]

Excuse the typos, I'm on the phone.

I'm not beta testing drive bender, Nathan is I think. I moved my server to Debian and it is now running ZFS for my media and backup pools. The only Windows I have left is the NUC HTPC and a VM to run Mc server.

About that disk he plugged in his laptop, that worked because it was a mirror. If it were a disk from a raid-ljke pool that wouldn't work.

[jmone]

Yeah - I'm on the DB Beta Team so I've just asked about where they are at with VSS support.  Last I heard they had it working but not reliably (eg Win Backup would sometimes work, sometimes fail to create the snapshot).  As I sync between pools I don't care !  but lets see what they say.  I do have the latest beta of DB installed if you want me to check something.

[marko]

My bad. Thanks for the offer Nathan. I'm OK for now. I'm using Goodsync at the moment.

I prefer to use Genie Backup Pro though. It lets me create jobs with files from various addresses, puts them all in a neat backup location, and from there, I can either restore the whole lot back where it all came from in a couple of clicks, or selectively from the catalogue. I really like that. It just won't work without VSS, and I'm not into adding drive letters for all the pooled drives and coming at it from that direction. Goodsync will do for now. Restoration being a pain if required, but not the end of the world. I get more patient as I get older and can hang out for native drivebender vss a while longer before I give up. It's not like I'm restoring backed up files on a daily basis.

-marko

[jmone]

Word back is that VSS is still not reliable at this stage (and I guess they are busy polishing the core rewrite over new bits).

[marko]

Ach well. Decent of them to get back to you. As long as it's still on the roadmap, that's great. Thanks for the update.

[jmone]

No probs - I'll let you know when it changes.