Is Storage Spaces reliable?

<p>Aidan Finn and others spend quite a bit of time talking and writing (aidanfinn.com)&nbsp;about the enterprise-level storage systems he and others build on Storage Spaces. You can build enough redundancy into the system to account for almost any kind of failure. I just read about a colleague’s issue with a failed&nbsp;capacitor taking out&nbsp;an HA pair of&nbsp;NetApp filers&nbsp;(both!), and you&nbsp;can&nbsp;pretty easily–and relatively inexpensively–build or buy a Storage Spaces system that would not be shaken by that issue.</p>
<p>So… reliable? Yes, it can be exceptionally reliable. I think the bad reputation is likely linked to Windows Home Server’s Drive Extender product, which is long gone. Storage Spaces has some similar functionality, but it’s different tech. The performance with Storage Spaces can be good, too, if you use mirror spaces&nbsp;(like RAID 10) or simple spaces (if you don’t care about redundancy; like RAID 0). Performance of parity spaces is pretty awful for writes, though–other than for archive purposes, I’d just avoid parity spaces.</p>
<p>However… while you can use USB hard drives with Storage Spaces, I’m not sure I would recommend that setup. You’d definitely want USB 3 if you do, though, and I’d just leave them connected all the time (don’t try to connect them to another computer).</p>
<p>Hope this helps….</p>