Win10 - Tiered Storage Space unsuable performance

Question

Dear Community,
Im faced with the issue of unusable performance (less then 2MB/s, sometimes dropping to 0 copying speed) in a tiered storage space. I'd need help in re-configuring that storage space without having to copy the data to somewhere (no money and frustration tolerance left for additional drives).
My expectations are that writes to the performance Tier should be at least 200MB/s and to the capacity 50MB/s as the hardware should be capable of far more. Obviously this storage space was created from powershell, as there is no GUI for this config in Win10. This system is intended to be used by a single user for archiving and small scale video editing on the same machine.

The system is a Win10Pro 10.0.19043 x64 in German language, Running on a System featuring a i7-2600k and 20GB of Ram.
The hard drives of the storage space are two Seagate ST12000VN008-2YS101 (10.91TB) and two Kingston SA400S37240G (223.57GB) they are correctly detected as HDD and SSD and all pass their respective SMART self-tests. They are configured as two mirrored tiers, which form one large pool. They all are listed as "healthy" and the storage pool is in the status "OK" . The virtual disk is formatted with NTFS. Windows Ram diagnosis didn't found any errors. The PSU was replaced as it was barely keeping within specs (manual measurement), but this issue still persists.
The CPU load is negligible during these copying operations and all drives are attached via SATA. The disk load however stays at 100%, but nearly nothing is happening.
Physical and logical sector size of the Storage space are 4096.
There is still around 1TB to copy to this storage space from a failing hardware raid (card+disk defective).
The event log does not give me any useful hints, as everything seems fine - but is not.

Personally I'm more used to administrate zfs based linux servers, but I'm assisting here a very good friend of mine, since we run out of ideas whats going wrong.

Answer 1

Hi @Johannes Timm

Thank you for your question and reaching out.

I can see from the Description you have "storage space from a failing hardware raid" which can slow down the Read operation and because of it will slow the Write to other disk

1. Please try to copy from Healthy Disk to Tiered Storage space volume
2. Disable any Antivirus program or Windows firewall you may have for temporary purpose.
3. Try to Boot your PC from Safe mode and copy the Data
4. Use RoboCopy instead Windows explorer for copy-paste.
5. Also try to run some Disk performance Bench mark tools (CrystalDiskMark) or DiskSPD to measure correct performance of your storage space.
   https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/manage/diskspd-overview

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/josebda/using-file-copy-to-measure-storage-performance-why-its-not-a-good-idea-and-what-you-should-do-instead

Hope this answers your question :)
Thank you.

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--If the reply is helpful, please Upvote and Accept as answer--

Answer 2

@Limitless Technology
Unfortunatly I've already tried your tips 1,2 and 4. Even in the disk benchmark (see below) the write speeds are horrible.

Ive run the DISM and sfc tool and used a fresh user account to do the benchmark.
Neither solved the problem.

Answer 3

SMART testing is designed to check drive parameters and predict drive failure.
Unfortunately drives can have excellent SMART and have already failed.

When using software to check SMART each software may check any parameter and provide scoring.
The checked parameters and the scoring may be different with each software.

A drive may pass one test and fail another.

Please run the following tests:

1) HD Tune: (free or trial version)
https://www.hdtune.com/
Post images or share links for results on these tabs:
a) Health
b) Benchmark
c) Full error scan

2) Sea Tools for Windows
https://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/seatools-win-master/
https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/how-to-use-seatools-for-windows-202435en/
long generic test

3) Run the Crucial scanner:
https://www.crucial.com/store/systemscanner
Post a URL displaying the results.

If the logs are English they can be scanned for reported problems.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/3813-add-remove-change-display-language-windows-10-a.html

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/136792-change-display-language-windows-10-a.html

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/83827-create-storage-space-storage-pool-windows-10-a.html

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/83769-optimize-drive-usage-storage-pool-storage-spaces-windows-10-a.html

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Answer 4

I know it's an old thread, but maybe this is still helpful to someone.

I've dealt with badly performing MSS like the OP's before.
Turns out that, ironically, the worst thing you can do to a freshly created Storage Space is to create a partition in the GUI.
I don't know what exactly goes wrong when you do that (aside from the small additional partition that windows creates on the SS), but erasing all partition (e.g. using Diskpart "clean" command) and creating a proper partition manually brings drives and virtual disks back up to full speed.

Last time I made the mistake of trusting Windows with the difficult task of partitioning a drive, read performance was cut down by half, writes were even worse. 3500MB/s seq read instead of 6000, 700MB seq write instead of 2000. Random reads were down to 5MB/s. On an NVMe PCIe3 8x cache drive ... . Good job Microsoft, good job Storage Spaces team. Terrific work.
Apparently that bug's been there since 8.1. But isn't it nice that we finally have Emojies in Win11? Suuper.
If it doesn't carry "Azure" or "Office365" in its name, its nothing more than an afterthought these days.

[/rant] Anyway, so I quickly cleaned the virtual disk in Diskpart and created a partition manually. Disk was back to full performance immediately.