@coliver said in Cross Posting - Storage Spaces Conundrum:
Some features of hardware RAID are useful. It isn't because it performs better then software RAID. It's much easier for bench workers to replace a drive with hardware RAID, that supports hot swap and blind swap, then it is for a bench worker to replace a drive with software RAID.
Makes sense.
@scottalanmiller said in Cross Posting - Storage Spaces Conundrum:
Actually that switched around 2000 when the Pentium IIIS hit the market (the S was the 1.1+ GHz line with the double cache, the ancestor of the Xeons) because the average system had enough spare CPU that the software RAID overhead was no longer an issue and the mainline CPUs and memory were so much faster than the RAID cards that it overall made the system faster. The gap between hardware and software RAID and the amount of spare resources for software RAID has continued to increase since then.
Why do people then continue to buy RAID cards in 2016, if there are many free software RAID solutions that should be faster?
I would suggest going with physical RAID as it usually provides you with better performance comparing to the software once and StarWind or ScaleIO on top of it as a vSAN.
ScaleIO is expensive and has good automation and management functionality.
StarWind is much less expensive and has redundant RAM caching in case you decide going HA some day.
They both scale very well so should fit you perfectly.
Hello John,
In you case i think StarWind Virtual SAN will fit perfectly. Thus we are glad to offer you our NFR license. You can get it by filling in this form and providing a link to this forum thread in it.
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-for-mvp-mct
Unfortunately NFR license will be provided to OP only (at least for now).