Drives for Storage Spaces Direct

Drives for Storage Spaces Direct

In deployments with multiple types of drives, it is configured automatically to use all drives of the “fastest” type.

Drive types

1. NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) refers to solid-state drives that sit directly on the PCIe bus.
2. SSD refers to solid-state drives, which connect via conventional SATA or SAS.
3. HDD refers to rotational, magnetic hard disk drives, which offer vast storage capacity.

Built-in cache

1. Option 1 – Maximizing performance-“all-flash”
   1. All NVMe.
   2. NVMe + SSD
   3. All SSD
   4. 
2. Option 2 – Balancing performance and capacity
   1. NVMe + HDD.
   2. SSD + HDD.
   3. NVMe + SSD + HDD
   4. 
3. Option 3 – Maximizing capacity
   1. SSD + HDD
   2. 

Sizing considerations

cache drives:capacity drives

1:2

best practice

The binding between cache and capacity drives can have any ratio, from 1:1 up to 1:12

• Cache
  1. For deployments with HDDs, a fair starting place is 10% of capacity
  2. For deployments with SSDs, a fair starting place is 5% of capacity
• General
  1. The more storage capacity per server, the longer the time required to resync data after downtime or rebooting, such when applying software updates.