FreeNAS vs Windows 8 "Storage Spaces"

[okwei]

Building new home storage server, anyone can give me list of pros/cons of FreeNAS vs the new "Storage Spaces" in Windows 8?

What I found so far is that "Storage Spaces" seems to be very dynamic and easy to use, you can add/remove disk one by one, supports storages in different sizes, types. I have no clue about its performance and hardware requirements comparing to FreeNAS.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/...rage-for-scale-resiliency-and-efficiency.aspx

 

[pirateghost]

ZFS + Snapshots

Nuf said

 

[Stephens]

Nuff said if you already get it, but he doesn't, so probably not nuff said.

 

[pirateghost]

Nuff said if you already get it, but he doesn't, so probably not nuff said.

yeah it would be terrible to actually do some of your own research and learn wtf FreeNAS has to offer....i sure wish we had some documentation on FreeNAS.....................

/sarcasm

seriously, RTFM and see what FreeNAS offers. It isnt difficult

 

[cyberjock]

The single reason why I wouldn't necessarily use the "Windows Spaces" is that it's not really tested in the real world. I know alot of ignorant geeks would say that I'm crazy because it's Microsoft and they wouldn't screw up THAT badly, but they do. I'm just not willing to trust my data to something that hasn't been tested for at least 12-18 months in the real world so I can google and see what stuff screws up regularly.

 

[bollar]

Storage Spaces are new and haven't been through rigorous testing against other solutions including ZFS. I only found one link:

Windows Server 2012 Storage Spaces – Poor IOPS performance

And here's another. Note the slow write performance and failed migration of an array between Windows 8 and Windows 2012 Server editions:
Server 2012 Storage Spaces-Testing the RTM Version

I assume MSFT will resolve these issues, but I'd be cautious for now.

 

[F_r_o]

I am curious how does this stand now? I know there have been some advancement on features for ZFS recently, ReFS has had a chance to bake in now.

 

[cyberjock]

I know two people that have used it in the past. They both ended up doing restores from backups. That was about 2 years ago though, and I have no idea how much it is used anymore. The people I work with use ZFS (duh) so I can't give good data points on ReFS usage, performance, or reliablity. Anyone else? I'd love to know what people think about ReFS that know how awesome ZFS is.

I'm sure ReFS isn't as feature-complete as ReFS, but I'm glad Windows has something that may be a reasonably good alternative that is native.

I do have wet dreams for ZFS on Windows being native and bootable... but I know that's basically going to happen around "never".

 

[Evertb1]

I do have wet dreams for ZFS on Windows being native and bootable... but I know that's basically going to happen around "never".

I share your dreams about this. I love FreeNAS as a fileserver but sometimes I think back to all that functionality I had available on my Windows Home server. If only....