Windows 10 Storage Spaces Confusion and poor performance with 4x 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD drives

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ConfusedaboutStorageSpaces

Hello,


I am having problems understanding Microsoft Storage Spaces. I created a 4-disk array using Two-way mirror. This is what it looks like in Storage Spaces:


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And here is the disk usage (from ~4TB total you get 1.8 TB Useable):







Question 1: Why does the Storage Spaces window indicate I am using 3.42 TB but the actual usage is more like ~25 GB? (This is a brand-new array and there is only ~25 GB data on it).



The disk performance is also very poor. This array is 4 identical Western Digital Black 1 TB NVMe M.2 disks connected using PCIe adapters. The drive optimization panel routinely returns erratic data and optimizing the drive either in that panel or in the Storage Spaces tool seems to do nothing.





Question 2: What is the best way to optimize drives (apply the TRIM function) when using a "sort of software RAID 10" (4-disk two-way mirror) in Storage Spaces?



Read and Write speed are very poor for this 4-drive two-way mirror as implemented in Storage Spaces on a Windows 10 Pro for Workstations operating system. There is only minor read speed improvement compared to a single drive, and the write speed of the 4-disk array is actually worse than a single disk. Theoretically, a "software RAID 10" should see improvements in both read and write speed over a single disk. The performance was worse for the 4-disk array configured as "Parity" (sort-of software RAID 5). I confirmed that the drives could reach double the write and read speed by setting up a 2-disk striped volume (software RAID 0) in the disk manager. It was not possible to reproduce this result in Storage Spaces. Creating a Simple (no resiliency) storage space did not improve read or write speed of the 4-disk array compared to a single disk.


Question 3: Is Storage Spaces just not prepared to take advantage of the speeds that should be attainable using small arrays of M.2 drives? Are there specific drivers that I need for either the PCIe bus or the drives themselves? Is anyone else having a similar problem?


Thank you in advance for you time; if you think you have some info that could help it is greatly appreciated.


Best,

ConfusedaboutStorageSpaces

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