# Windows 8 RAID



## coastalconn (Jan 10, 2014)

Maybe everyone else knows this already, but Win 8 had built in Software RAID for mirroring.  I consider myself pretty computer savvy, but I had no idea until last week.  I started looking into Hardware RAID options that seemed to be pretty pricey.  I ended up grabbing 2-2TB externals and set them up under "Storage Spaces"

Just figured I would pass this along in case it could help someone else...


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## lambertpix (Jan 10, 2014)

Most Intel chipsets have had onboard RAID support for quite a while.  In addition to this firmware-level support, Intel has had a desktop utility to manage / monitor RAID volumes, too.  It's called "Intel Rapid Storage" in the current chipset, but it used to be called Matrix something-or-other.  I honestly don't know if the firmware-level RAID performs any differently than full software-level RAID, but I probably trust it a bit more than Windows.  I've been through the repair / rebuild process a couple times with the Intel stuff, and it's always worked well for me.  It's possible this is for desktop chipsets only, though, which might not be helpful for everyone.


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## robbins.photo (Jan 10, 2014)

coastalconn said:


> Maybe everyone else knows this already, but Win 8 had built in Software RAID for mirroring.  I consider myself pretty computer savvy, but I had no idea until last week.  I started looking into Hardware RAID options that seemed to be pretty pricey.  I ended up grabbing 2-2TB externals and set them up under "Storage Spaces"
> 
> Just figured I would pass this along in case it could help someone else...



Lol - well I'm sticking with Win 7 for the foreseeable future.   I looked at Win 8, and to say I hated the interface would be putting it mildly.


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## coastalconn (Jan 10, 2014)

robbins.photo said:


> Lol - well I'm sticking with Win 7 for the foreseeable future.   I looked at Win 8, and to say I hated the interface would be putting it mildly.


I felt the same way when I got my computer last year.  There is an app called Start8 for $5, Install it and Voila you have a start button again and your normal desktop.


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## lambertpix (Jan 10, 2014)

coastalconn said:


> I felt the same way when I got my computer last year.  There is an app called Start8 for $5, Install it and Voila you have a start button again and your normal desktop.



I'm using classicshell.net -- free.  I'm still not a big fan of Windows 8, though -- not nearly as stable as Win 7.  At some point, I'll do the 8.1 upgrade and see if that helps at all.  Lots of little changes (nominally for usability), but the end result is that I can't get to stuff when I need it.  I had to hack the damned thing just to be able to boot into safe mode to fix it when it wouldn't boot.  Not quite ready for release.

Anyway, the Intel RAID stuff worked on everything back to Vista, if not earlier, and since it's a BIOS thing, I'm pretty sure it works fine in Linux, too.


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## robbins.photo (Jan 10, 2014)

coastalconn said:


> robbins.photo said:
> 
> 
> > Lol - well I'm sticking with Win 7 for the foreseeable future.   I looked at Win 8, and to say I hated the interface would be putting it mildly.
> ...



Well my thought process was I put a ton of money into an I7 with two TV's as monitors - one is a 40" and the other is a 32" - the last thing in the world I want is to turn that into an interface designed for a 7" tablet.  I really don't want the worlds biggest cell phone on my desk.. lol.

Besides, I never upgrade Windows until the newest version hits at least service pack 2 - and in this case I probably won't at all.  Windows 8 has nothing to offer me at all from what I can see, my system is fast and stable under 7 with no issues.


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## manaheim (Jan 11, 2014)

The motherboard-based RAID is a little better than software RAID. Software is pretty bad, generally... it's "fine".  Don't do RAID5 though... yikes.  RAID1 is fine.

The add-on cards are a significant step up in most cases.


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## vimwiz (Jan 11, 2014)

manaheim said:


> The motherboard-based RAID is a little better than software RAID. Software is pretty bad, generally... it's "fine".  Don't do RAID5 though... yikes.  RAID1 is fine.



The problem is performance, and speed, with SW raid.

On HW raid setups (In my day job I maintain servers) when you write to a logical volume backed by a HW raid array, the data is written to buffers on the raid card, then flushed asynchronously to the physical disks. This improves performance and also is backed up by a battery so when you come back from  a power outage, it can write this to the physical drives, and then check the arrray for consistency. I guess in a SW raid setup, it eaither writes synchronously (Which in RAID 1 would really hurt performance) or writes dangerously (In which case you absolutely must use a UPS and avoid lockups). Also, SW raid is historically dog slow to rebuild an array. Once at work I rebuilt an array of 9 1tb SATA disks (RAID 1 other than a small system root and swap), on a linux box, and it took *days*, whereas I had a HP box with 20odd 3tb SAS disks behind (an expensive) HW raid setup rebuild in just under a working day. SW RAID also hammers the CPU if you do lots of disk I/O.


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## JClishe (Jan 11, 2014)

Storage Spaces is significantly more than just software RAID. Windows (the NT variants, so not Win 9x or 2K Pro) has had software RAID as far back as NT4 and maybe even 3.51, I can't remember off the top of my head. But yes, Storage Spaces is a new concept to the previous software RAID options that Windows had. Basically storage spaces allow you to create virtual disks, which are RAID volumes that aren't mapped 1:1 to physical disks. So say you have 3 1TB drives (not including the system drive, you can't include the system drive in a Storage Space). You could take those 3 drives and create a 3TB pool. Within that pool you could, for example, create a 500GB mirrored virtual disk, a 1TB RAID 5 virtual disk, and put the remainder of the space into a non-resilient virtual disk. Then at some point in the future you could add more disks to your system and, on the fly, extend the sizes of any or all of your existing virtual disks. You could even completely replace all 3 of your 1TB disks with 2TB disks without needing to destroy / recreate your virtual disks and volumes.

Storage spaces also supports things like de-duplication, thin provisioning, hot spares, and storage tiering (which allows you to combine SSD's and traditional spindles in a single virtual disk and Storage Spaces will keep hot data on the SSD's and lesser used data on the spindles). Sure there are enterprise storage systems that do all of this, but we're not talking about the enterprise here, we're talking about features that you have available to you on your desktop PC. And yes many desktop motherboards nowadays have Intel storage controllers that support RAID but if you're comparing features and flexibility, it's no contest that Storage Spaces is a far more feature-rich option. And yes hardware RAID generally is faster than software RAID but that doesn't mean you'll notice it. In fact if you're accessing your RAID volumes over a typical gigabit home network you absolutely will NOT notice a performance impact, as the network is your bottleneck.

Personally I have about 12 disks of varying sizes spread across 2 file servers and a couple of external USB 3.0 storage enclosures connected to those servers. Historically I'd created hardware RAID volumes using the onboard Intel RAID chipset and I hated that anytime I wanted to add or upgrade disks, it was a destructive process to the existing RAID volumes and a huge pain in my ass of moving data around. When Storage Spaces came along I disabled all the onboard Intel stuff and instead carved up all my storage in Storage Spaces and it's been so much better and easier to work with. And since these are file servers on my network, the network speed is the bottleneck so any argument over hardware Vs software RAID performance is a moot point; data transferred at 112 MB/s between my desktop and files servers when I using the Intel RAID controllers, and data still transfers at 112 MB/s after switching over to Storage Spaces. 

Sorry this is so long but all the comments thus far have been about software RAID and since the OP's comments were about Storage Spaces I wanted to clarify that Storage Spaces is more than just RAID. And when we're talking about home-use desktop PC environments there are some significant storage management features built right into the OS that would cost serious money to find in an equivalent hardware solution. Anyone that has a lot of storage to manage, as is typically the case with photographers, would be ill-advised to quickly dismiss Storage Spaces without first fully understanding what it offers and how that matches up to what's personally important to you based on your own storage management needs. My own setup is living proof that it's made my life easier with zero downside.


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