8 Myths about Storage Spaces

[Music] hello and welcome to my channel my name is Belkin Kosovich and I will tell you a story about storage spaces if you care about your data you have a database sequel server database for example or you have some precious documents financial documents or iorry need speed disk speed for video editing or you just have pictures of your family you don't want to lose when this crashes especially if you have cloud servers this is a must because cloud servers let's be honest don't give you a very fast drives at least for some normal price and basically any machine that can fit three drives and has windows so as this video is for you so this is about 8 myths about storage spaces enjoy but first a bit about terminology storage pool is a set of disks set of physical disks and we will create will create virtual disks on top of this physical array of disks this disk can be totally different in size and type it's just listed it's just a list of disks called storage pool then storage space storage space is in fact a virtual disk a drive it will become logical drive OS will see it as a logical drive and for a virtual disk you define things like sighs like parity will it have parity or not and then volume volume is a partition on a disk on a logical disk on a virtual disk so it can have a drive letter etc so let's let's get on eight myths about storage spaces first met storage spaces will work on a server operating system not true I will show you a demo with Windows 10 which is client operating system works brilliant perfectly then meet with only two disks can we have both mirrored and striped virtual disks for two benefits mirror is when you don't want to lose data when one disk crashes so for data safety resiliency and striping is used when you need speed when you need speed double the speed for example you have two disks you need double this to double the speed of one disk and you still get the space of both disks so this is great if it can be achieved and I will show you that immediately so what it is about okay let me let me show you one picture so these are two disks two physical disks this one and disk two and we created a storage pool and listed these two disks are part of the storage pool then we created a virtual disk across this storage pool with a parity of mirror raid 1 and then we created another virtual disk virtual disk 2 without any parity so it is a simple virtual drive it is striping a raid 0 for speed to get the speed and when you write data let's say your data is ABCD in this virtual disk ABCD is written on both physical disks and in this virtual disk with striping without parity data is written across all the drives and if it is this disk fails this physical disk if it fails this virtual disk still has all the data it saved you all the data but this virtual disk has only part of the data you lost the data and that's about it you get speed with this and you get the resiliency with this both at the same time with only two physical disks isn't that great I think it is so let's see that in action let's see that in action I'm in Windows 10 I will type storage spaces and then I'll click create a new pool yes I have three disks available all three are ten gigabytes and I will put only two disks into this pool I will create a pool of two drives and this both two drives are on the USB stick that is for me to easily simulate disk failure I would just pull it pull it out to simulate the failure so this is a storage space two-way mirror eight gigabytes I will I will give it five gigabytes space it will take take 10 gigabytes because 5+5 and two-way mirror we will assign it immediately Drive letter and will create a storage space that is virtual disk virtual disk and after that we should see it in our storage pool consists of two physical disks and has one storage space or virtual disk one virtual disk five gigabytes physical drives - and if I click on my computer we see C Drive which is a system Drive and and our storage space Drive which uses mirroring now I will create another create another storage space or virtual disk so we will create a storage space I will call it virtual disk striping and it will be simple no resiliency you see parity is like rate 5 it uses onedrive for parity so you lose capacity of onedrive this is mirror with every data written in two places this is mirror with every data written in three places free disks so I will choose a simple because it has super fast performance no loss in storage space brilliant so I will give it also 5 gigabytes create now I have across 2 physical drives I have 2 virtual disks let me change the name each it's a word chill disk mirroring change ok so we have two virtual disk mirroring and striping let's in my computer how it looks so we have mirroring and striping I can create more virtual disks I can even over I can even create disks that are bigger than exact capacity of this two physical disks but it's not very recommended so let's see what ardham myths next myths I can help both mirrored and strut virtual disks yes adding disk if we create pool with two disks initially can we add just one disk or we must obey column number so-called and we must always add number of drives we initially had in the pool let's try let's see if it works we we initially had two drives and let's try to add and drive so my storage pool I click Add drives to the pool only one drive is available and I will click Add drives notice this checkbox optimize drive usage to spread existing data across all drives so I will add it that I succeeded optimizing drive usage so now it is spreading the data across three drives instead of only two drives and it is nearly completed and after that so this myth is busted we can only add one that drive no matter how many drives we had initially so we can add any number of drives we like and energize we have Excel does adding disks adds also speed because some people tell no if you added drive you cannot get speed you just get capacity bla bla bla you saw this optimisation it spread data across all the drives so all the drives participate in in raw data speed so you get the speed you get the spin and I measured it and I will show you results in the pictures so you see here we have we have a speed of mirror two disks on USB both are on USB right speed is terrible we have speed on striping to disks but both are on USB so it's still terrible speed because USB is the limit and then three disks third drive is not a newest bitter drivers SSD but with adding this third drive we got lot faster speeds as you can see so it is measured and proved you get additional speed not just pace with adding discs okay expanding virtual disk is it difficult does it require reboot or what let's expand it let's see how it works okay we will say these are our two virtual drives let's change second one let's expand it it's now five gigabytes so you can see in Drive in in Disk Management you can see sizes of the disk so you can see system disk and our two physical our two virtual disks they both have a bit less than five gigabytes so let's expand it to let's say eight gigabytes change finished and let's see here eight gigabytes was it difficult did it require downtime no it's online it's super easy to clicks and you're finished just be careful don't over expand your drives because each expansion takes some space I'm not too sure how much but it can be half gigabyte or quarter gigabyte it's substantial space and second thing it you cannot decrease the size you can just expand virtual disk you cannot decrease the size so expand it as much as you need but don't expand it very frequently expand it enough so you won't expand it every day next myth next myth is shrinking virtual disk I already reply to that shrinking unfortunately is not possible so don't expand it too much I mean you can expand it to any number you like like this for example I can change it to thousand ten thousand gigabytes okay and now I have a virtual disk with that ten thousand ten terabytes I don't have that much space actually I have only twenty eight gigabytes of total physical disk space and data currently uses almost six gigabytes so I my data still fits but soon it would I would I would be warned that I need to add more physical drives to support what I claimed I support ten terabytes don't don't do that don't don't over expand it so next myth is removing drives can you remove the disk that is used in virtual disks and has data on it can we remove the drive let's try okay let's try to remove one physical disk so we have three physical disks and I will remove the middle one I will prepare it for removal okay and this preparation of removal actually spreads the data spreads the data this disk ass spreads it across other drives it cleans it from the data cleans out the data from that drive and once this process is finished I will be able to prove this drive out without and without losing any information even even I won't lose information even from this striping set of disks and I will speed it up for you it takes some time okay now it is finished and I will remove this disk from the pool even if it is used in both virtual disks remove the drive remove the drive after drives removed we still have two discs so mirroring works static works always we're good everything is green everything is fine with only two physical disks now the last myth is so we can remove the disk safely failing discs does mirroring or parity really protects your data if disk failure occurs let's try that I will now do something for you and that is I will pull this USB out this USB actually is where the one of the drives is now now let's see what happens still nothing is detected here although one Drive is missing this drive is was removed so nothing is detected but if I try to use this disk with striping it should be like fail at failed disk it should be like failed disk so if I try to write something here new Microsoft Word document okay it it works but if I would our storage spaces problem aha we have errors one physical drive is missing and that's why we have on striping we have error our drives our files our data is not accessible anymore and mirroring has only a warning it's not error that means mirroring Drive should work without any issues so this is mirroring Drive although one drive failed it should work without any issues of Microsoft Word document it's here I can do anything it copy-paste it works basically if one drive is failing mirroring will save it 3-way mirroring would save if two drives are failing failed so all myths are busted I hope you enjoyed it I hope you enjoyed this presentation I hope you will take advantage of storage spaces and to get faster speed or more resiliency for your data and visit visit my web page contact me if you want and help with sequel server and bye bye till next video [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Vedran Kesegic

Views: 5,180

Keywords: Storage Spaces, Windows

Id: r-qXbLjQJ3Q

Length: 18min 58sec (1138 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 28 2019