Microsoft Storage Spaces - HP Micro Server - Benchmarks

"Storage Spaces enables cost-effective, highly available, scalable, and flexible storage solutions for business-critical (virtual or physical) deployments. Storage Spaces delivers sophisticated storage virtualization capabilities, which empower customers to use industry-standard storage for single computer and scalable multi-node deployments. It is appropriate for a wide range of customers, including enterprise and cloud hosting companies, which use Windows Server for highly available storage that can cost-effectively grow with demand."

In Microsft Windows 8/8.1/10/ Server 2012/2012 R2/2016 Storage Spaces is an alternative method of joining multiple Physical Drives into a variety of 'Virtual Disks'. This has a few advantages in the form of high flexibility, but comes with the caveats of lower speeds than traditional hardware raid.

I have recently acquired a Gen8 HP Micro Server with 4x 2TB Western Digital RED drives in it. The Micro Server has an inbuilt Software Raid controller capable of only Raid 1 and Raid 0, so I'm interested in Storage Spaces for a Raid 5 equivilent.

The part I'm most interested in is the speeds the three modes can run at, so I've performed just a few quick benchmarks on each mode (Simple, Mirror, Parity) for a short comparison, enjoy!

Server Manager - Storage Spaces

Crystal Disk Mark

Virtual Disk - Simple Mode

Virtual Disk - Mirror Mode

Virtual Disk - Parity Mode

HDTach

Virtual Disk - Simple Mode

Virtual Disk - Mirror Mode

Virtual Disk - Parity Mode

So in conclusion, Simple mode offers the highest throughput, as its essentially offering 4 disk Raid 0.
Mirror Mode offers a nice balance, at the expense of storage capacity and Parity Mode gives the best comprimise between storage space and redundancy at the expense of write speed.

I believe the reason the Parity HDTach result is so high is due to the fact it uses a cache for reading data, so the speed is actually the Interface Speed rather than the disk speed, so I believe the Crystal Disk Mark result is more reliable in this instance.

Read more about Storage Spaces here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831739%28v=ws.11%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396