Parity Storage Space so slow that it's unusable

Using the same pool comprising of multiple 1.5TB/2TB WD&Seagate drives on a Core 2 Quad System.

Regular Storage Space shows performance over 100MB/sec

Mirror Storage Space shows performance of around 80MB/sec

Parity Storage Space shows performance of 80MB/sec initially but as you copy a large file the performance keeps dropping until it reaches single digits making this pool option basically unusable. Is this a bug or is it expected behaviour?

March 13th, 2012 1:13pm

I'm not benchmarking the feature but have been performing similar measurements to get a feel for what is possible and the impact of choosing thin provisioning etc. I've had some very strange results too variable to be statistically significant, but I can't work out what to expect. This variability could well be down to device drivers rather than the volume manager/software raid layer. Saying that my past experience of software RAID performance in Windows, both native and third party ( Veritas SFW ), has been poor. It has to be said storage spaces look very like SFW.

Out of interest, how many independent spindles are in your pool? Do you see high CPU when utilising parity? If you create a pool from a subset of spindles and perform I/O on a volume in the pool do you see activity on all the spindles in your machine or just those in the pool?

I assume "simple" layout is equivalent to RAID-0. What isn't clear is if all the disks in a pool are involved when you select mirror or parity. What are mirror and parity equivalent to in RAID levels, 10 & 50 respectively? But if there are three disks and you choose mirror as the storage layout do you get three plexes or two plexes with one spindle unused, certainly when I create a 20GB mirror in a pool with 3 physical devices I lose 40GB from the pool, does that mean there are two plexes regardless of the pool physical disk count? What if you choose mirror and the pool contains 7 physical disks, do you get a stripe or concatenation of mirrors where the submirrors are a mix of two and three plexes? The same question applies to the parity layout option and what happens when you mix virtual disk layouts within a pool?

Why is a 1GB allocation retained on any disk which has been part of a virtual disk? I need to use the clean operation in diskpart to have the free space returned to expected. As another poster has pointed out disks which are not returned to the primordial pool prior to the OS being reinstalled have limited functionality when the existing pool is "rediscovered" by the new OS install. It seems impossible to delete such a pool and the only way I have found to return the disks to the primordial pool is to boot to a command prompt from W2K8R2 media and perform a clean on the disks from dispart.

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
March 15th, 2012 8:17pm

Some of your questions need to be answered by MSFT. Right now the server has 2 1.5TB drives an 1 2TB drive and a 60GB SSD as the OS drive. I created one storage pool that includes both 1.5TB drives and the 2TB drive. Within that pool I created the different types for Spaces for my testing. So, at the pool level, there is no mirror or parity settings. That happens at the space level. The CPU is a Core 2 Quad 2.5Ghz and it is never stressed by the Mirror or Parity writes.

March 15th, 2012 8:24pm

Thanks, I know some of my questions are for Microsoft, I was just putting my thoughts out there as it is impossible to quantify performance without understanding roughly what happens under the lid. With only three spindles in the pool some of my own questions aren't relevant to you.

I've performed a similar test with data copied from a simple virtual disk in a three spindle pool to simple, mirror and parity virtual disks carved out of a separate three spindle pool. In my case the disks in question are 6*15K SAS. I've also peformed tests using iometer against iSCSI virtual disks on each of the virtual disks. I didn't experience the same behaviour as you with a parity virtual disk, my write speeds were variable throughout the tests. However, the parity pool was an order of magnitude slower than simple or mirror virtual disks so yes I'd agree that it isn't a viable choice at present.

You'd think at least one of the cores in your system would be showing load when calculating parity but like you mine ( 2 * Opteron 4122 ) shows virtually no load when writing to parity virtual disks. Nothing new there though, this was the same in 2003/2008. It may be that the threads performing the parity calculation are artificially throttled but if that is the case it definitely needs to be tuneable in server "8" if it is to be used purely as a storage platform.

I've stopped looking at Storage Spaces for now, it works as a technology preview and will be neat when it is production ready.

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
March 16th, 2012 10:38am

I have been experimenting with Storage Spaces on my previous Windows Home Server 2011 box (Intel Xeon X3450 16gb RAM)

I have 6 2tb drives in a thin provisioned parity storage pool.

When copying files (1+gb files), it will do an initial burst of writing then stop completely.  I notice that in the Resource Monitor/Disk tab, it shows the file being written so I can see it is still writing.  It will start copying again once the data is flushed to the hard drives, although it takes quite a while.  I can understand this if the system is calculating parity information but my CPU is never spiked either.  It almost needs to have the copy slowed down so the system can keep up.

Copying from a Windows 7 machine to the Windows 8 server over a gigabit network will give errors such as the file needs to be replaced and the destination file shows 0 bytes even though I am copying it for the first time.  Also copying from more than one source at the same time to the storage pool will occasionally disconnect the server from the network and cause error connecting to \\server\share messages.  Hitting retry on the copy will start it again but then stop.  This makes it difficult to do unattended file copying.

March 18th, 2012 8:03pm

I've experienced the same thing, running on a Intel Core 2 Quad (Q6600, P45 motherboard) with 5 drives in the storage pool. Striped and mirrored virtual disks work fine but as soon as I try to copy things onto the parity disk everything just goes down the drain, it seems to copy data in "bursts" and then just stop and wait for minutes (copying 50GB of data from another local disk took hours).

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
March 27th, 2012 8:37am

From all the evidence I can gather so far, the Parity pools get pretty good read performance (essentially N - 1 drive speed), but the writes are stuck right around 25MB/s.


That's glacially slow considering how fast the processors are, they should easily be able to calculate parity faster than that.


I have a feeling that Microsoft is playing it too safe and not caching any write back data. On my Intel RAID 5, the same thing happens if I disable the write cache, the speed becomes unusable.


So, I'm waiting for the final version to see if Microsoft improves things. I believe they allow you to do things like use an SSD for the journal log. Maybe you can specify a write back cache option with the powershell commands.
April 1st, 2012 5:52pm

My question is if there is Storage Pools in Windows 8 Consumer Preview and in Windows Server 8, are they both the same or is the one in Windows Server 8 beta?  I am hoping this one is beta or else many users will be disappointed with this kind of performance.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
April 4th, 2012 5:25am

I try Parity storage pool with 3 x 500gb (7200) and I have the same "slow" write issue. I have something like 20-30MB/sec. Really slow !
April 30th, 2012 8:23pm

Wow, I have a spaces test setup that I'm trialling, 7 1tb drives divided into two thinly provisioned spaces, my games space which has no redundancy and the test space which has two drive redundancy.

I get bursts of about 30m/b write which is about what I expected, then it sharply drops off after a while to about 250k/s. Quite frustrating when I'm trying to copy the contents of a 2TB drive.

Is there a Connect space to report this too? I haven't seen any.

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
April 30th, 2012 11:26pm

Can confirm the same. When copying large amount of data/files to parity disks, writepe rformance droups untilly fully stops or disk disappear from My Computer. With Simple disks no issues.Waiting for Server 8 RC, hope guys will fix this issue
May 18th, 2012 4:04pm

I am getting the same issue on Server 8 Beta, I have 5x 500GB SATA disks making a storage pool of 2.27TB and a 2TB virtual disk with Thin provisioning and Parity layout, formatted in ReFS.

Did some testing with it today and as all others have found the transfer starts off maxing out the network at around 100-110MB/s then about 1/4 of the way through almost pauses for a few seconds and the rest of the transfer continues at around 25MB/s with some copying it starts to ask if it can over write the file.

The RC is out next week so lets see if that fixes it.

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
May 29th, 2012 4:11pm

Anyone tried parity performance on the Release Preview yet? Just curious.
June 1st, 2012 7:03am

On Server 2012 RC, I got ~30MB/sec in an 18 minute test on an NTFS formatted parity volume across 3x 250GB 7200rpm disks. Better, but still not great.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
June 1st, 2012 7:59am

Getting quite good performance on the RC with 5 drives (sizes between 750GB - 1.5TB), usually get around 50-70MB/s and it never pauses like it did in the beta where it just stopped writing to the disks for minutes.

June 2nd, 2012 6:06am

I have a storage space with 23 disks over 6 controllers. They range in size from 250GB to 1TB (all 7200rpm 3.5" SATA). There's a ~10TB fixed size parity virtual disk over that space, with an NTFS volume created on that virtual disk.

Copying from a fast array on a Server 2008 R2 machine over gigabit Ethernet, I have 1.57TB copied so far in 37 hours ~= 12 MB/second. That's really bad compared to even a single disk, let alone what you should expect from the raw capabilities of the hardware (hundreds of MB/sec). Even Windows software RAID5 gave 20MB/sec on the same hardware.

Summary: don't expect any decent write performance from Storage Spaces - at least based off the RC.


  • Edited by David Trounce Monday, June 04, 2012 11:18 PM
  • Proposed as answer by Mick E Monday, September 10, 2012 8:55 PM
  • Unproposed as answer by Mick E Monday, September 10, 2012 8:55 PM
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
June 4th, 2012 11:14pm

Hope this helps someone after some days fiddling. I was getting burst copy of up to 80Mbps on parity storage space drive and then dropping to zero before bursting again over and over. After a while I removed all files and put all the storage drives on my main 4 sata ports with the boot drive and another storage drive onto the Gigabyte motherboard chipset 2 ports separately. I then achieved a steady 10Mbps. This was still no good so then I realized in my bios I have IDE instead of AHCI selected. After this change I now achieve 30-40 Mbps writing. Not sure of read speed yet but it will be faster of course. Now I don't know if I spread another drive over the Gigabyte ports if it would affect the speed but it is logical that it wouldn't as it seems the system is storing the data in memory to ensure the data is written first SATA then switching to IDE as my drives were spread across the two types and ensuring the write is successful before saying OK give me the rest. Good Luck.          
September 10th, 2012 8:55pm

I just bought 2 HP micro servers, as i will be replacing my HP Ultra 4 Nas boxs..

Servers are running Windows 2012 Standard.

Have configured Parity pool with x3 2TB drives..need to copy near 5TB - and it is slow, painfully slow.

Initial burst is fast, then 10MB/sec..

Microsoft MUST have a fix for this?

Anyone?

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
November 9th, 2012 8:59pm

If you have your server protected by a UPS you could run this PowerShell command:

Set-StoragePool -FriendlyName <Storage Pool Name> -IsPowerProtected $True

It will boost parity write performance greatly.  There is a risk of data corruption if the server doesn't go down gracefully though.  You have to decide if it's worth the marginal risk.

I went from 20MBps sustained write to 75+MBps on WD Green drives.   I've seen 120MBps write on Black drives.



  • Edited by w The One w Friday, November 09, 2012 9:52 PM
November 9th, 2012 9:51pm

Setting the storage pool to Set-StoragePool -FriendlyName <Storage Pool Name> -IsPowerProtected $True didn't do anything to improve my storage spaces performance. It actually made it worse. Before entering this command I had a pattern of high-low-high-low throughput. Whereas high was about 50-70MBps and low about 0-25MBps and the interval between high and low is about 3-5 seconds. Now with -IsPowerProtected enabled the throughput pattern is high-low-low-low,whereas high is about 170MBps for the first 10-15 seconds and and than it stays low at about 1MB/s to 20MB/s.

Here is the total time required to copy 8GB of data from a local SSD drive to the Storage Pool (3x 1TB 7200rpm drives)

Total time set to $False = 3:35 minutes

Total time set to $True = 4:01 minutes

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
November 25th, 2012 4:42pm

Trying Storage Spaces for the first time on Windows 8 Pro.   3 Spindles, 2 TB each configured in a parity.    My writes are ranging between 10-15/MB/sec.   I'd rather move to a NAS over USB 2.0 if speeds continue to be this poor.     Copying back roughly 2TB of data I moved off these disks before configuring them is going to take days.   Love to hear if anyone has had any luck resolving the performance problems.

November 25th, 2012 7:17pm

Did anybody try any block level caching software? RAM or SSD? To accelerate slow storage spaces?
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
November 25th, 2012 7:33pm

I tried "Set-StoragePool -FriendlyName <Storage Pool Name> -IsPowerProtected $True" initially without success.  But I then went into device manager/disk drives/policies and made sure all disks only had "enable write caching on the device" EXCEPT  for the one new disk drive for storage spaces that I had created called "Microsoft Storage Space Device" which I then checked the second box "turn off Window write-cache buffer flushing on the device". And since I do have an external ups for my server I am not worried about the warning for turning this off.  The problem with writes to disk pausing while the buffers flush and write to disk have all gone away.

Twitch



I am using a Storage pool with 3x2TB and 2x2TB disk.  The virtual disk is set to 10TB thinly provisioned, with 5 columns.
  • Edited by DJ twitch Wednesday, December 26, 2012 8:24 PM
  • Proposed as answer by DJ twitch Wednesday, December 26, 2012 8:24 PM
December 26th, 2012 8:17pm

What sustained throughput are you getting, now that the stop-and-go behavior is gone?

I've got a 3x 2TB pool of Seagate ST32000641AS drives, connected to Intel X58SO motherboard with an i7 XE CPU. "Enable write-caching on the device" and "Turn off write-cache buffer flushing on the device" are enabled for the Storage Space and all of the actual drives in the pool.

I've been able to achieve an initial spike of 90-130 MB/sec. However, sustained transfers are about 40-50 MB/sec. I'm trying to figure out if this is the upper bound I'm ever going to get.

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
January 28th, 2013 6:03am

What sustained throughput are you getting, now that the stop-and-go behavior is gone?

I've got a 3x 2TB pool of Seagate ST32000641AS drives, connected to Intel X58SO motherboard with an i7 XE CPU. "Enable write-caching on the device" and "Turn off write-cache buffer flushing on the device" are enabled for the Storage Space and all of the actual drives in the pool.

I've been able to achieve an initial spike of 90-130 MB/sec. However, sustained transfers are about 40-50 MB/sec. I'm trying to figure out if this is the upper bound I'm ever going to get.

Initial spike is becase you're filling your cache. After you're done you're doing cache flush @ background and THAT is an actual performance of your I/O subsystem. 
January 28th, 2013 10:41am

In case you are all still working on this, I have been too and stumbled across your thread.

I bought 2012 Data Center, and have been running it on an upgraded box since it came out.  Server power is not a problem, but I'm getting 7.97MB/s sustained xfer using Storage Spaces + Parity (Fixed Maximum size - essentially RAID-5) + ReFS on five 2TB drives.  When copying a 3.2TB VHDX, RAM usage would go from 32GB to 99GB then performance dived. I didn't want to order my Backblaze POD until I could get this thing figured out...

So, what I figured out is that it was writing to one drive of the five CONSTANTLY, while the others did nothing. After updating the BIOS, drivers and anything I could think of, I dismembered the Spaces a few times and went back to windows soft-RAID5... I found out that it didn't work either... Why? Caching was enabled on 4 of the 5 drives, and refused to enable on the fifth. So I disabled the cache on all drives (in Disk Manager, couldn't find it in Server Manager).  After setting up Spaces again, the drive lights are matching up beautifully, and are spreading the load.  The RAM usage is still incredibly high, but hey, it works now :)

Specs:
2x E5620
144GB ECC
8x 146GB SAS RAID-10
5x 2TB RE4


Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
February 1st, 2013 12:36am

I was able to resolve my issues by moving everything over to a newly created but identical NTFS formatted partition with 3-Way MIRROR mode enabled (NOT Parity).

After a lot of testing, I have come to the conclusion that neither ReFS, nor Parity-Based storage spaces are ready for "prime-time". I am now achieving 100-150 MB/s sustained writes and 300-600 MB/s sustained reads on a 3-way Mirror set running on 5 WD Red 3TB drives.

I should note that I do have a UPS set up, and power settings and cache settings are set as such, but all testing was done on sustained speeds, rather than burst speeds. The caching settings only seemed to affect performance for small reads/writes, under the size of the collective cache of the drives (64MBx5).

When running either Parity+ReFS, or Mirroring+ReFS, I never achieved writes faster than 20 MB/s, and with Parity+NTFS, writes never performed better than ~50 MB/s.

Hopefully, Microsoft will work out the issues with ReFS and Parity under storage spaces, as the features offered are desireable, but certainly not at the performance cost being seen.

  • Proposed as answer by dreamwraith Tuesday, February 05, 2013 11:14 PM
February 5th, 2013 11:13pm

Hello, I was just reading through the thread and wanted to add my findings from my home lab.

System specs are : 4 x 2TB 5900 RPM HDD, 4GB DDR2, Core2Duo E6850, old ich9r controller.

Original software RAID 5 array using the onboard ich9r would give me approx 90MB/s write and 250MB/s read.

Using storage spaces (all disks assigned to one pool) and one virtual disk set in parity (one volume, NTFS), initial reads come in at 470MB/s read but only 20MB/s write.

After using Set-StoragePool -FriendlyName <Storage Pool Name> -IsPowerProtected $True suggested above, im now seeing sustained writes of 85MB/s. Tested transfer was 1.8TB of data of varying sizes.

Perhaps this is an issue with ReFS ?

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
April 24th, 2013 10:26am

does anyone know if ReFS, nor Parity-Based storage spaces performance issues been addressed in windows server 2012 R2
June 4th, 2013 1:59am

I am experiencing the same issues and thus far, nothing has really helped (tried all the above).

I have a server with 10 * 4TB drives attached in a parity storage space and although initial performance is great, after about say 5GB of data it nose dives terribly and then it's all over the shop. Initial speeds are around 1.5GB/s (not a typo) and then they drop down to under a few hundred meg a second with the occasional drop below 100.

That's a monumental drop off. Software RAID performs exactly the same.

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
June 4th, 2013 9:06am

Interesting. I disabled cache on all my drives (although it feels wrong to do it) and speed drop outs are definitely better. Now i drop down to about 300mb/s.

I unfortunately have a difficult one to diagnose and work with, as I have two RAID controllers involved (a 4 port and an 8 port - hence using storage spaces to get one drive instead of hardware RAID).

Definitely seeing an improvement with Windows drive cache off - but maybe that's because my RAID controller has its own cache?

June 4th, 2013 9:17am

Interesting. I disabled cache on all my drives (although it feels wrong to do it) and speed drop outs are definitely better. Now i drop down to about 300mb/s.

I unfortunately have a difficult one to diagnose and work with, as I have two RAID controllers involved (a 4 port and an 8 port - hence using storage spaces to get one drive instead of hardware RAID).

Definitely seeing an improvement with Windows drive cache off - but maybe that's because my RAID controller has its own cache?

Yes absolutely. Turn all caches OFF and you'll see lovely read-modify-write parity RAID w/o write coalescing (remember, NTFS or it's ulgy brother ReFS don't to it like WAFL does) performance being ~1/4 of your reads.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
June 4th, 2013 2:46pm

I'm facing the same issue here...

Could you explain where did you disable the write cache for your drive ? I have a storage space of 3 drives and tried to disable write cache for every one (Device Manager -> Disk drivers -> Policies -> Write-caching policy but this didn't help :( 

I've tried to disable write-caching for the Microsoft Storage space device but it didn't allow me... :(


July 6th, 2013 7:24pm

does anyone know if ReFS, nor Parity-Based storage spaces performance issues been addressed in windows server 2012 R2
No. You really need log-structured file system or intermediate volume manager to fight parity RAIDs. ReFS and Storage Spaces don't do it.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
July 7th, 2013 2:57pm

I'm facing the same issue here...

Could you explain where did you disable the write cache for your drive ? I have a storage space of 3 drives and tried to disable write cache for every one (Device Manager -> Disk drivers -> Policies -> Write-caching policy but this didn't help :( 

I've tried to disable write-caching for the Microsoft Storage space device but it didn't allow me... :(


I did it in my RAID controller BIOS.
July 7th, 2013 2:58pm

storage pools are at their best with rows of servers, not individual disks

first problem, fault tolerance when thing go wrong

second problem, everybody using server grade disks? Desktop disks are not suitable.

RAID cards are used in servers to host the disks, rack after rack of server is what the storage is best seen as

think cloud

1) That's called a RAIN and not RAID. Different thing. Few companies did it with a general lack of success. Think about Lefthand Networks and their issues to scale beyond 4-5 node array.

2) There's no problem with fault tolerance. Mirrored metadata between "controller" nodes and some way to distribute actual data between "storage" nodes (erasure codes, hash etc). Again tons of companies do this. Think about NEC HYDRAstor, Hitachi HCP etc. The only problem is - these things are real Enterprise hardcore, space Windows physically don't belong to (at least yet).

3) There's no magic behind Enterprise disks. 2x-3x times more IOPS using the same capacity and that's pretty much all. And there's nothing wrong with NL-SAS and NL-SATA spindles. People need capacity not all is hunting for IOPS. Properly implemented Logical Volume Manager of any kind should work with both. ZFS for example does...

4) Cloud is not a panacea. Paying for transactions on routine basis is not what most of the people want to do (at least yet).

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
July 7th, 2013 3:05pm

does anyone know if ReFS, nor Parity-Based storage spaces performance issues been addressed in windows server 2012 R2

I am using some 64TB VHDX files that are formatted with ReFS as data storage. So far no problems.

What performance numbers are you getting from parity (do you happen to use double parity?) storage spaces with WS 2012 R2?
July 7th, 2013 8:22pm

Bumping this as i've had some issues with parity and thought I should share.

I have 6x 6TB Western Digital in a parity array. I don't have a SSD for buffering.

Just note that the initial speed when you first transfer a file is fast as it is buffered to memory. you will see this if you open task manager and do a file copy. Once it hits 40-50% of usable memory, it throttles the copying to empty the buffer.

-ispowerprotected gave me an additional 10-15mb/s (50mb/s). On investigating, it seems this command turns off buffering to memory. 

The only way you will see a performance increase for write speeds is by using a SSD in the array (write back cache).



  • Edited by infused Wednesday, November 05, 2014 2:54 AM
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
November 5th, 2014 2:50am

So my personal experience - had the same issue. Parity storage pool, ReFS, about 24 x 3TB spindles. Copying large chunks of data (multiple TBs), I'd get about 100MB/s for about a minute, then it would just drop off altogether.

Changes made: set the IsPowerProtected to $TRUE and turned off the write cache buffering on each disk. Since making this change, I'm now getting about 115MB/s, so it's a marginally improvement, but more importantly it's sustained so I'm able to complete the copy of the large chunks of data. I'm using it for a backup repository so this is fine for my needs.

What's confusing is when I copy this data I'm seeing network traffic sustain at close to 1Gb/s, disk I/O fluctuates wildly, but memory barely even registers (I've got 32GB on the box). So I'm pretty sure the disk write is the bottleneck, but I'm not sure if this is a hardware limitation or whether I can change the configuration to write faster.

November 13th, 2014 1:18am

I've posted my results here.

http://tecfused.com/2014/11/14/storage-spaces-and-parity-slow-write-speeds/

I'm getting pretty good speed now.

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
November 14th, 2014 12:59am

I'm having the same issue.  Worked well for months.  Was getting 80+ mb/s.  Now, it's less than 500 kb/s.  It is so slow that I can no longer steam any videos that I have stored on there.  It just skips and stutters the whole time.  I know it's not a LAN issue because I was copying file from my storage space to my C drive, not over the network.  

Did you ever find a fix for this issue?  I don't know what to do here.  This is completely useless for me.  Can't stream videos.  It's even too slow to copy all of the video files to a different local drive and remove the storage space completely.  

I am running chkdsk p: /f /r right now.  It has been running for hours and is only 3% done.  The ETA is 999:00:00.  Here is the output:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.3.9600]
(c) 2013 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Windows\system32>chkdsk p: /f /r
The type of the file system is NTFS.

Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another
process.  Chkdsk may run if this volume is dismounted first.
ALL OPENED HANDLES TO THIS VOLUME WOULD THEN BE INVALID.
Would you like to force a dismount on this volume? (Y/N) y
Volume dismounted.  All opened handles to this volume are now invalid.
Volume label is Parity Space.

Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ...


  249088 file records processed.

File verification completed.


  0 large file records processed.


  0 bad file records processed.

Stage 2: Examining file name linkage ...


  321404 index entries processed.

Index verification completed.


  0 unindexed files scanned.


  0 unindexed files recovered.

Stage 3: Examining security descriptors ...
Security descriptor verification completed.


  36159 data files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...


  38938600 USN bytes processed.

Usn Journal verification completed.

Stage 4: Looking for bad clusters in user file data ...
Progress: 8668 of 249072 done; Stage:  3%; Total:  0%; ETA: 999:00:00 ..

Any ideas on what to do here?  I can't seem to use any of files on the storage space.  Looking for a way to make this usable again.  Or at least be able to copy my files off the drive without taking years.

July 14th, 2015 2:51pm

5 hours later and still going at 3%...

Progress: 8675 of 249072 done; Stage:  3%; Total:  0%; ETA: 999:00:00 .

So it's taken 5 hours to get through 7 files...  Anyone got any advice for me?

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
July 14th, 2015 7:59pm

5 hours later and still going at 3%...

Progress: 8675 of 249072 done; Stage:  3%; Total:  0%; ETA: 999:00:00 .

So it's taken 5 hours to get through 7 files...  Anyone got any advice for me?

I've not encountered this issue before. Sounds like there may be a parity check going on?

If you stop/pause the file transfer and open resource manager, what's the disk queue like on that pool/drive?

July 14th, 2015 8:06pm

If I completely rebooted to close out the chkdsk and anything that may be using it, the resource monitor shows that the disk queue is empty for my parity drive.  If I start a copy of a file from my parity drive to my C drive, the disk queue jumps up to 1 or 2.  That's all.  Even though the queue is so low, it is transferring at less than 100 KB/s.  It will often go down to 0 KB/s and jump back up a bit.  But seems to always stay lower than 700 KB/s.

Any other thoughts?

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
July 14th, 2015 10:26pm

What about copying locally on the computer, from the parity drive to the OS drive. Do you get full speed?
July 14th, 2015 10:32pm

No I get horrible speed.  That's what I was describing above.  Copying a file from my parity drive to my local C drive usually stays below 700 KB/s.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
July 14th, 2015 10:38pm

Anyone got any advice for a fix? I have terabytes of data on these drives. I can't even get the data off the drives since it will take YEARS to copy them to another location. There has to be something that can be done to fix this issue.
July 28th, 2015 1:57pm

I upgraded to Windows 10 and that fixed the issue for me.  At least for now.  Hopefully it continues to work well, but not sure I can totally trust it anymore.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
July 29th, 2015 5:34pm

Spoke too soon.  Issue is back.  All files are unusable.  Too slow to work.  I'll be searching for an alternative solution to Storage Spaces....
September 13th, 2015 9:57pm

This topic is archived. No further replies will be accepted.

Other recent topics Other recent topics