Does turning off the virtualization features make your CPU go faster for non-virtualized workloads?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
Next big decision is whether to use the hardware raid controller or some sexy Storage Spaces strategy. Stay tuned for a separate thread.
Since when is Windows software RAID sexy? Ewwww
Since it picks up all of the fumbles the H710 Perc makes: Trim support, guaranteed per-drive overprovisioning, winning in Crystal benchmarks ( so far ). I guess. Still trying to figure this all out so it may be a fool's errand. Just to be clear I'm not talking about the vanilla software RAID you can do in disk manager, this is something totally different.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
Storage spaces is nothing new, its just a rebranding and is fragile at best.
Fragile how? It's putting up some pretty hardcore numbers in Crystal so far and has worked seemingly flawlessly on my workstation w/ an unsettling Frankenstein of old laptop drives, a few 7200 3.5"s, and a... wait for it.... thumb drive in a Raid 0 equivalent.
20 years of being the bane of the storage industry. It's the reason that hardware RAID exists. Windows software RAID is famously the last resort for those who can't afford hardware RAID but can't risk doing nothing. It famously underperforms and falls apart.
I think we're talking about two different things here. Well, I hope we are.
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@creayt said:
Just to be clear I'm not talking about the vanilla software RAID you can do in disk manager, this is something totally different.
It's all the same. Storage Spaces is the new release of Windows software RAID. Don't be blinded by the name change. Skype for Business is just Lync is just MS Communicator. OneDrive for Business is just Groove. Storage Spaces is just Software RAID. This is what MS does and boy is it effective, just change the name and everyone accepts a decade of disaster as a new product and feels like all the industry knowledge that something is bad gets washed away.
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@creayt said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
Storage spaces is nothing new, its just a rebranding and is fragile at best.
Fragile how? It's putting up some pretty hardcore numbers in Crystal so far and has worked seemingly flawlessly on my workstation w/ an unsettling Frankenstein of old laptop drives, a few 7200 3.5"s, and a... wait for it.... thumb drive in a Raid 0 equivalent.
20 years of being the bane of the storage industry. It's the reason that hardware RAID exists. Windows software RAID is famously the last resort for those who can't afford hardware RAID but can't risk doing nothing. It famously underperforms and falls apart.
I think we're talking about two different things here. Well, I hope we are.
We are talking about Storage Spaces. There is only one thing.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
Storage spaces is nothing new, its just a rebranding and is fragile at best.
Fragile how? It's putting up some pretty hardcore numbers in Crystal so far and has worked seemingly flawlessly on my workstation w/ an unsettling Frankenstein of old laptop drives, a few 7200 3.5"s, and a... wait for it.... thumb drive in a Raid 0 equivalent.
20 years of being the bane of the storage industry. It's the reason that hardware RAID exists. Windows software RAID is famously the last resort for those who can't afford hardware RAID but can't risk doing nothing. It famously underperforms and falls apart.
I think we're talking about two different things here. Well, I hope we are.
We are talking about Storage Spaces. There is only one thing.
Oh ok. But when I create a software RAID in disk manager it's a lot different/simpler than the Storage Spaces way where you create pools, volumes, columns, etc.
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@creayt said:
Since it picks up all of the fumbles the H710 Perc makes: Trim support, guaranteed per-drive overprovisioning, winning in Crystal benchmarks ( so far ).
You are just describing software RAID. Nothing special here.
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@creayt said:
Oh ok. But when I create a software RAID in disk manager it's a lot different/simpler than the Storage Spaces way where you create pools, volumes, columns, etc.
Understood. One is the last revision, one is the new one. It's all Windows software RAID under the hood. Yes, they released a new version and have a new interface and are adding features. But this is still Windows software RAID. I'm not saying that they don't keep working on it and don't add new features, I'm saying that after 20 years of everyone having "learned their lesson" on this, letting MS rename a bad product and giving them a free pass on a tradition of problems is a really, really bad idea. Storage Spaces is an unproven update to a well known problematic product. And we've seen people lose data from Storage Spaces failing, so this isn't just theory.
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If Ford renamed the Pinto the "Grand Tourer" would you just buy it? What if they added a new color scheme? This is the storage industry's Pinto with a new coat of paint and a new brand name. MS is making an effort, but we can't be blinded by a good advertising campaign and forget what it is underneath.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
Since it picks up all of the fumbles the H710 Perc makes: Trim support, guaranteed per-drive overprovisioning, winning in Crystal benchmarks ( so far ).
You are just describing software RAID. Nothing special here.
I see. So in general is software RAID for specifically SSD deployments superior to a humble controller like a Perc H710P because of these features then? Or should the hardware RAID still be better independent of these things?
According to my understanding of Anandtech's review you can just completely transform performance on these 850 Pro drives particularly by ensuring proper overprovisioning, which I'd seem to lose at this point w/ the hardware RAID.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8216/samsung-ssd-850-pro-128gb-256gb-1tb-review-enter-the-3d-era/7
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@scottalanmiller said:
If Ford renamed the Pinto the "Grand Tourer" would you just buy it? What if they added a new color scheme? This is the storage industry's Pinto with a new coat of paint and a new brand name. MS is making an effort, but we can't be blinded by a good advertising campaign and forget what it is underneath.
That seems to kind of dismiss the ability of software to be re-engineered to dramatically different effect. I know that I've gone back into an algorithm I created years earlier, tweaked, reorganized, and optimized it, and got 50000%+ better performance out of the update than its original writing had. Is that the wrong way to think about software RAID? Why couldn't Microsoft theoretically write some amazing code that made it way way way faster than it ever had been before?
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@creayt said:
I see. So in general is software RAID for specifically SSD deployments superior to a humble controller like a Perc H710P because of these features then? Or should the hardware RAID still be better independent of these things?
Software RAID and hardware RAID only refers to where the RAID is implemented. But there are commonalities. Hardware RAID's purpose is two-fold: one to fix the problems with Windows software RAID and two to make things easy so that you don't need to be a storage expert.
With the exception of Windows software RAID, software RAID in any enterprise OS crushes hardware RAID and has since 2002 (when 133 FSB Pentium III was standard.) Software RAID is faster and more powerful, but requires more work and knowledge. For the SMB market where performance rarely matters and ease of use matters a lot, hardware RAID really wins. Any, of course, anytime you run Windows you want hardware RAID because of the fragility in Windows software RAID.
But in the enterprise space (big iron servers) hardware RAID has never even existed. Hardware RAID has existed solely for the purpose of solving issues with Windows.
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@scottalanmiller said:
And we've seen people lose data from Storage Spaces failing, so this isn't just theory.
Ah, I see. That's kind of what I'm looking for. What happened to cause the data loss? Random failure?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
I see. So in general is software RAID for specifically SSD deployments superior to a humble controller like a Perc H710P because of these features then? Or should the hardware RAID still be better independent of these things?
Software RAID and hardware RAID only refers to where the RAID is implemented. But there are commonalities. Hardware RAID's purpose is two-fold: one to fix the problems with Windows software RAID and two to make things easy so that you don't need to be a storage expert.
With the exception of Windows software RAID, software RAID in any enterprise OS crushes hardware RAID and has since 2002 (when 133 FSB Pentium III was standard.) Software RAID is faster and more powerful, but requires more work and knowledge. For the SMB market where performance rarely matters and ease of use matters a lot, hardware RAID really wins. Any, of course, anytime you run Windows you want hardware RAID because of the fragility in Windows software RAID.
But in the enterprise space (big iron servers) hardware RAID has never even existed. Hardware RAID has existed solely for the purpose of solving issues with Windows.
This is mind blowing, I had no idea. Unfortunately I need to stick w/ Windows for the foreseeable future at least as I'm just now dipping into servers myself and this is for a personal project ( new web app I'm creating ). Very informative, thank you.
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@creayt said:
@scottalanmiller said:
And we've seen people lose data from Storage Spaces failing, so this isn't just theory.
Ah, I see. That's kind of what I'm looking for. What happened to cause the data loss? Random failure?
Yes, the fear is around the entire framework failing. Data recovery from Windows software RAID, and long term stability, have never been all that great.
Now if the only goal is speed, your priorities change. So if you really just care about how fast it can go, you look at things differently.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Now if the only goal is speed, your priorities change. So if you really just care about how fast it can go, you look at things differently.
I see. I guess it makes sense at least w/ my limited knowledge of how it all works. If a single 850 Pro using system RAM as the write cache can pull off the numbers below on my home-made $1000 workstation ( over 4 GB/s read and write ), and my server has 256GB RAM for Storage Spaces to use, I imagine the hardware RAID wouldn't stand a chance. The risk of data loss is very scary though, and may end up being the deciding factor. Out of curiosity, were the data loss issues you saw pre Server 2012 era or post?
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The issues have mostly been around array failure. Either at run time or at reboot that the array simply fails and the array is lost with or without a drive failure. The software RAID equivalent of a DAC, I suppose. I have no doubt that Microsoft is putting tremendous effort into addressing traditional shortcomings and working to catch up to their decade-long lag versus Solaris and other platforms on this. But Storage Spaces is still nascent and needs time to prove its reliability because I will be comfortable recommending it given a twenty year history of problems with the product and some continuing reports of issues still.
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@creayt said:
What RAID level is giving you those numbers?
The 1:10 Sequential ratio seems really wrong.
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@MattSpeller said:
@creayt said:
What RAID level is giving you those numbers?
The 1:10 Sequential ratio seems really wrong.
That's literally a SINGLE 850 Pro 256 GB using the box's RAM as a write back cache ( Samsung's "rapid mode" ).
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@creayt ohhhhhhhhhhhhh ok - that was messing with my brain. thank you for clarification.
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@MattSpeller said:
@creayt ohhhhhhhhhhhhh ok - that was messing with my brain. thank you for clarification.
NP.
I should note in case it matters that it's a quad 3.8 Ghz Xeon w/ HT and 32 GB DDR3 1600.
My dual-core i7-5500U w/ 8GB of RAM puts these up w/ a single 840 Evo though, notice the awkwardly spectacular 6GB write.
