Windows 2016 Storage Spaces Testing

Setup is rather simple for Storage Spaces on 2016, with clicking on File and Storage Services and then Storage Pools

From there you will see that Primordial Pool and on the bottom right the Physical Disks available for use.

From there click Tasks and New Storage Pool

Name your Pool

Select the drives you wish to use.  For us, we chose 4 disk to create a mirrored pool.  Selecting five drives or including the NVMe drive cause a failure to create a Virtual Disk.

Click Create

Go Virtual Disk, Tasks and New Virtual Disk

Name the Virtual Disk and Select “Create storage tiers on this virtual disk” if you have a SSD on the machine.  For us we have M.2 Samsung SSD in the system.

This is not an enclosure, we do not select Enclosure Awareness.

We make a decision between storage and speed and redundancy.  For us we want the redundancy but can’t because we need a even number of same sized disks.  If we were to chose only 4 disks, we would be able to use Mirror, but for just testing a

les

Since we chose Tiered Storage, we cannot choose thin provisioning.

Once the creation is complete, go and format the disk.

Now we benchmark, where it becomes immediately apparent that Spaces fails terrible on 4K Writes and does really well on Sequential.  I would expect better 4K writes from a Single 7200 RPM drive.