I have been using Win 2012 Essentials for few weeks now. I am very happy so far with the performance and features in general, but when it comes to Storage Pools it's a bit of a mixed bag.
My first setup with my 3 data drives (1x 1TB, 2x 1.5TB). I first had the issue described in the sticky post. Then I made the mistake to choose thin provisioning for the virtual drives. It was good at first but as I started moving my data to the drives I reached a brick wall where one of the virtual drive would not accept any more data despite the physical drives being far from full.
I restarted from scratch again, but this time before moving data over, I did some testing with different configurations and I decided to stick with fixed provisioning and parity for the two main virtual drives and mirror for the rest of the space.
Now everything is running smoothly and I have all the space and redundancy I need. I guess I should have done more research at the beginning. After all this, I can suggest to avoid thin provisioning unless you have 4 or more drives with the option to easily add more to the pool when needed. Unless writing performance is critical for you, prefer parity over mirror for redundancy and finally have a clear idea of how you want to allocate the space in your pool.
My first setup with my 3 data drives (1x 1TB, 2x 1.5TB). I first had the issue described in the sticky post. Then I made the mistake to choose thin provisioning for the virtual drives. It was good at first but as I started moving my data to the drives I reached a brick wall where one of the virtual drive would not accept any more data despite the physical drives being far from full.
I restarted from scratch again, but this time before moving data over, I did some testing with different configurations and I decided to stick with fixed provisioning and parity for the two main virtual drives and mirror for the rest of the space.
Now everything is running smoothly and I have all the space and redundancy I need. I guess I should have done more research at the beginning. After all this, I can suggest to avoid thin provisioning unless you have 4 or more drives with the option to easily add more to the pool when needed. Unless writing performance is critical for you, prefer parity over mirror for redundancy and finally have a clear idea of how you want to allocate the space in your pool.