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I'm building a home server with Windows Server 2012 R2 and am planning to utilise the Storage Spaces feature. I have 4 hard drives (4 TB WD Reds) that will be holding a variety of data - media files, documents, ISO files, backups from PCs as well as the server itself, etc. However, I'm undecided on whether I should combine all the drives into one big storage pool, or split them - 2 in one pool, 2 in the other. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each approach? In either case, about half of the total storage would be dedicated to backups, and all storage spaces (virtual disks) would be two-way mirror.

All examples and articles I've read online seem to use a single storage pool. However, the way I see it, having two pools has a couple of advantages:

  1. Slightly improved resilience. A single pool with mirrored spaces can survive a single disk failure. But a setup with two pools could survive a second disk failure as well, as long as both disks are in different pools.

  2. Should I need to connect the disks to another system (e.g. in case the server suffers a total hardware failure), I'd only need two disks (one from each pool) to bring all storage spaces online (albeit in a non-resilient state). With a single pool I'd need three disks (all but one).

The only possible downside I see is losing some performance because with two disks per pool data cannot be striped across multiple columns.

Anything I'm overlooking? Are there any recommendations or best practices regarding this?

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    Have you thought about using an actual RAID configuration?
    – Ramhound
    Jul 16, 2015 at 13:41
  • Age old, but Ramhound's suggestion is wise... but your current hardware does introduce some limitation as to the RAID configurations available to you. RAID5 but you've only got 1 disk redundancy. RAID01 and RAID10 offer you better redundancy at the cost of storage space... read up about the different failures of the nested arrays, though, as if any one side of an array, for example, could fail and you would lose the entire array... a separate backup is crucial using any RAID.
    – Kinnectus
    Jul 16, 2015 at 13:49
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    @Ramhound You mean hardware RAID? I have, but for various reasons decided against it. Please, let's not turn this into a hardware vs. software RAID discussion :)
    – Indrek
    Jul 16, 2015 at 13:50
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    @Indrek - I just wanted to know if you considered it. I personally don't trust software RAID solutions, I have far to many reasons to even begin to list, let alone fit in 500 characters. Storage Spaces is a software RAID solution, but limited to Windows, hence the reason I asked. I mean you did want to hear our recommendations and the best practices with regards to this right?
    – Ramhound
    Jul 16, 2015 at 14:02
  • @Ramhound Best practices vis-à-vis my question, yes. I'm really not interested in recommendations regarding hardware vs. software RAID, or one software RAID solution vs. others. I've researched the advantages and disadvantages of Storage Spaces compared to competing solutions, and have made my decision based on that.
    – Indrek
    Jul 16, 2015 at 15:18

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I will totally agree with you.

I have 2 x 2.5in 500GB drives, 2 x 3.5in 3TB drives and 2 x 2TB drives (1x 3.5in and 1 x 2.5 in). I have played with one pool and 3 different pools and having 3 different pools have saved me because I had the drives connected via USB which they kept getting disconnected and still didn't lose data. I have finally migrated them all to a tower Celeron PC and they worked fine.

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