Limitations

Number of drives and capacity:

  • Up to 240 drives in one pool (in Windows Server 2012 R2, earlier - up to 160) but there can be several pools.
  • Up to 80 drives in a clustered pool (up to 4 pools in cluster).
  • Up to 64 virtual disks in one pool.
  • The total capacity of the pool is up to 480 Tib.

Columns and number of drives in a virtual disk (VD):

VD-type Min number of columns Column / Drive Ratio Min number of drives Max number of columns
Simple 1 1:1 1
2-way mirror 1 1:2 2
3-way mirror 1 1:3 5
Single parity 3 1:1 3 8
Dual parity 7 1:1 7 17

Also:

  • The Storage Spaces virtual disk cannot be used as a boot disk.
  • Only SAS, SATA and USB drives can be used. RAID controllers' volumes, iSCSI, FC and other volumes are not supported.

Cluster use requirements:

  • "Thin" disks cannot be used. Only fixed provisioning is allowed.
  • The minimum number of disks for a double mirror is 3, for a triple mirror it is 5.
  • In a cluster: you can use VDs with Parity but only starting with Windows Storage Server 2012 R2.
  • Disks used: only SAS with SPC (SCSI persistent reservation) support. Some of the early versions of SAS-drives do not support SPC…