Storage Pool Number of Column

Question

Hello,

I have read many article when we creating the storage pool, the number of column have significant to increase the performance. Unfortunately if we want to resize number of column we need to destroy the volume.

For my first initialization i only have 3 HDDs and maybe will add some HDDs in couple of months, with this scenario what number of column should i used to get maximum write/read performance?

Answer 1

Hello,

Thank you for posting in Q&A forum.

According to your description, the number of columns has a significant impact on performance when creating a storage pool, and adjusting the number of columns requires destroying the volume, so careful consideration is needed.

Generally speaking, for an initial configuration of three hard drives, choosing two columns may be a good choice. This can achieve better performance under the current number of hard drives, and when adding more hard drives in the future, it is possible to consider adjusting the number of columns to further optimize performance.

It is important to carefully evaluate your needs and future expansion plans before making a decision. If possible, conduct some benchmark tests to evaluate the impact of different column numbers on performance, in order to make more accurate decisions.

I hope this answer is helpful to you! If you have any other questions, please feel free to let me know.

Best regards，

Jill Zhou

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Answer 2

Please check the following article to get a better understanding of how columns in Storage Spaces (Direct) work https://www.miru.ch/why-column-size-does-matter-with-storage-spaces/. That said, your configuration of 3 spindles will be comparably slow with Storage Spaces (Direct) no matter how many columns you use for your Storage Pool. A general recommendation would be to go with two columns and scaling and add another 3 HDDs to the existing ones as you grow.

However, if you need performance, you should probably use a hardware RAID controller instead of Storage Spaces, especially if you are considering parity/RAID5 storage layout. Alternatively, you may add some Flash or NVMe drives into your server(s) to create a Multi-Resilient Volume for better performance.

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/concepts/nested-resiliency
• https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/configure-a-resilient-volume-on-windows-server