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I've been messing around with Windows Server and storage tiers for a little while now. I ended up building an 8 drive RAID6 equivalent storage pool 2 drives as parity and all was for the most part, good, minus the write performance on the pool. Recently I've wanted to remedy that so I purchased a pair of SSDs that I wanted to use as a cache for storage tiers.

However, I'm not sure if I can add them after the fact without rebuilding the entire array.

I added the SSDs into the pool through the server manager: https://i.stack.imgur.com/wja7P.png

However when I check the properties of the virtual disk, it shows that storage tiers are disabled: https://i.stack.imgur.com/jaa7A.png

Performance on the array is the same as it was before so I'm pretty sure that the storage tiers are not set up properly.

I'm not sure if there's something that I'm missing that needs to be done at this point, but is it possible to add the SSDs as a cache without losing all of the data that's currently on them?

Thanks!

Mr.Potatinator
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1 Answers1

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First of all, I wouldn't recommend using RAID 6 with the spindle drives, if you need capacity, go at least RAID 50; 60. Next, there is no way to reconfigure current Storage Spaces pool as a tiered pool. You can backup all the data and recreate it from scratch using PowerShell or even server management GUI. Also, don't forget about Microsoft recommendation regarding tiering (30%/70% flash to HDD ratio). Here is the step-by-step guide which can be helpful. https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/canitpro/2013/12/04/step-by-step-creating-a-tiered-storage-space/

Stuka
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    This may be a bit of a noob question, but why is RAID 6 not recommended with spindles? – Mr.Potatinator Feb 28 '18 at 19:46
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    RAID6 has 6x write penalty so while flash has no issues with random writes spindles will suffer from double parity greatly. https://theithollow.com/2012/03/21/understanding-raid-penalty/ – BaronSamedi1958 Mar 03 '18 at 02:57