Users Guide

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Storage Spaces best practices
Storage pools
When setting up pools, ensure that the physical disks are spread evenly across all the enclosures by using
multiple pools, rather than assigning a pool to one enclosure.
For example, if you have two Dell Storage MD1420 enclosures full of HDDs and SSDs. Each enclosure has
20 HDDs and four SSDs installed. 40 HDDs and eight SSDs are available for configuring in the pool. In this
example, you require a minimum of two pools. Pool1 contains two SSDs and 10 HDDs from the first
MD1420 and two SSDs and 10 HDDs from the second MD1420. Pool2 contains the remaining disks.
Figure 2. Distribution of physical disks across pools
Configuring storage pools for rebuilds
Storage Spaces automatically rebuilds VDs by using free disk space and does not require assigning hot-
spares. If a physical disk fails, Storage Spaces regenerates the failed physical disk from free storage disk
space without any user’s intervention. This means that the rebuild begins immediately limiting the
exposure to additional physical disk failure while the VD is already running in a degraded state.
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