REFS and VSS storage advice needed

Question

REFS and VSS storage advice needed

Anonymous

Hi Folks,

I need some advice.

I recently purchased a 12-disk Dell PowerVault ME5012 storage array which will hook up to a Dell PowerEdge 7515 server running Windows Server 2022 Standard via a 12GB SAS connector. My company plans to use the storage array to store raw footage of high quality videos and high-res images. The storage array will have eleven 22TB disks (already purchased) configured as RAID6 + 1 hot spare yielding about 198 TB of virtual disk capacity. I plan to format it as REFS (Drive F:) in Windows using 64k block/cluster size.

The server itself has an existing 50TB NTFS disk (Drive D:). I plan to use this 50tb disk to manage shadow copies for the 198TB REFS drive (Drive F:) so that I can take advantage of the "Restore previous versions" feature. I think Microsoft recommends 10-20% capacity for shadow copies, so 50tb should hopefully be more than sufficient for a 198TB REFS disk.

Given the setup above, I appreciate any red flags, warnings, advice, and/or better recommendations.

Thank you!

-sul.

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1 answer

Answer 1

Hello Sul,

Overall, your setup looks solid to me. Using REFS with a 64k block/cluster size for the 198TB virtual disk is a good choice for storing large files like high-quality videos and images.

Regarding using the 50TB NTFS disk for managing shadow copies for the REFS drive, keep in mind that the 10-20% capacity recommendation for shadow copies is a general guideline, and the actual space required will depend on factors like the rate of change of your data. Make sure to monitor the shadow copy storage usage regularly.

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REFS and VSS storage advice needed

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