Greetings,
I'm having some trouble with my Windows Storage Pool and my VirtualDisk running on a Windows Server 2012 R2 installation. It consists of 8x Western Digital RE-4 2TB drives + 2x Western Digital Black Edition 2TB drives and have been configured in a single-disk parity setup and the virtual disk is running fixed provisioning (max size) and is formatted with ReFS.
It's been running solid for months besides some awful write-speeds at times, it seems like the write performance running ReFS compared to NTFS is not that good.
I was recommended to add SSD's for journalling in order to boost write-performance. Sadly I seemed to screw up this part, you need to due this through PowerShell and it needs to be done before creating the virtualdisk. I managed to add my SSD to the Storage Pool and then remove it.
This seem to have caused some awkward issues, I'm not quite sure of why as the virtualdisk is "fixed" so adding the SSD to the Storage Pool shouldn't really do anything, right? But after I did this my virtual disk have been stuck in "Warning: In Service" and it seems to be stuck? It's been 4-5 days and it's still the same and the performance is currently horrible. Moving 40GB of data off the virtual disk took me about 20 hours or so. Launching files under 1mb of the virtual disk takes several minutes etc.. It's pretty much useless.
The GUI is not providing any useful information about what's going on. What does "Warning: In Service" actually imply? How am I supposed to know how long this is supposed to take? Running Get-Virtualdisk in PowerShell does not provide any useful information either. I did try to do a repair through the Server Manager GUI but it goes to about 21% within 2-3 hours but drops back down to 10%. I have had the repair running for days but it wont go past 21% without dropping back down again.
Running repair through PowerShell yields the same results, but if I detach the virtual disk and then try to repair through PowerShell (the GUI wont let me do repair on detached virtual disks) it will just run for a split second and then close.
After doing some "Googeling" I've seen people mentioning that the repair is not able to finish unless I have at least the same amount of free space in the Storage Pool as the largest drive in my Storage Pool is housing so I added a 4TB drive as due to me running fixed provisioning I had used all the space in the pool but the repair is still not able to go past 21%.
As am running "fixed provisioning" I guess adding a extra drive to the pool doesn't do much difference as it's not available for the virtual disk? So I went ahead and deleted 3 TB of data on the virtual disk so now I've got about 4 TB free space on the virtual disk so there should be plenty of room for Windows Server 2012 R2 to re-build the parity or whatever it's trying to do but it's still the same, the repair wont move past 21% and the virtual disk is still stuck in "Warning: In Service" mode and the performance keeps being horrible so taking a backup will take forever at these speeds...
Am I missing something here? All the drives in the pool is working fine. I have verified using various bootable tools so why is this happening and what can I do to get the virtual disk running at full state again? Why doesn't the GUI prompt you with any kind of usable information?
Best regards, Thomas Andre