ReFS on Storage Spaces – Is Storage Tiering Working in Windows Server 2019?

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I couldn't find any real information on this 😀 I have Windows Server 2019 with one Storage Pool consisting of two HDDs and two SSDs with tiering and mirroring. On that there is a volume running ReFS.

How can I check if ReFS tiering is working and can the tier be set manually?

Best Answer

You can check it in the Performance Monitor. Add Physical disks Read and Write counters for your SSDs and HDDs. In this case, you will be able to see which Tier is being utilized by seeing which drives are doing IO. In addition, configure ReFS counter of fast and slow tiers utilization percentage. This information will give you data distribution between Tiers. In my expereience, Storage Spaces counters just do not work with ReFS, I tried it multiple times. In addition, you can read how tiered ReFS works here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/refs/mirror-accelerated-parity P.S. Yeah, I know, it is written about S2D, but it works the same way in Storage Spaces it. I've tested it multiple times.

Related Solutions

Windows – Over 600GB of Phantom Data on Windows Storage Space Volume

Run command CHKDSK and check the output if 'total disk space' differs from space reported.

You can run the CHKDSK C: /F command to check and repair possibly lost space not associated to files, and check again the total disk space reported.

See this Microsoft article to check if any of the listed problems could be possible in your system:

Cluster Size Is Too Large
File Attributes or NTFS Permissions
Invalid File Names
NTFS Master File Table (MFT) Expansion
Alternate Data Streams
NTFS File System Corruption
Other NTFS Features That May Cause File Allocation Confusion

ReFS / storage spaces drive being dropped under heavy load

Storage spaces seems very sensitive to write latency: if it too much spikes, the volume can be dropped.

This seems a know problem when using consumer SSDs, as you can find here

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows – Over 600GB of Phantom Data on Windows Storage Space Volume

ReFS / storage spaces drive being dropped under heavy load

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