New version of the Storage Spaces physical disk validation PowerShell script
The Storage Spaces team has just published a new version of the Storage Space disk validation script written in PowerShell.
This script makes sure that the physical disks in a system have everything that is needed by Storage Spaces. That includes checking functional requirements and performance characteristics.
In the same way that we ask you to run the Cluster Validation Wizard before creating a cluster, it is a great idea to always run this script before using a specific set of disks with Storage Spaces.
The changes in the version 2 of the script include:
- Intelligent parallelized drive profiling dramatically speeds up script execution time. Script will first profile throughput and IOPS of a single drive from each group, then the group in aggregate, and use these numbers to figure out the maximum batch size possible while remaining under Throughput or CPU limitations.
- Intelligent SSD preconditioning. Script will only pre-condition the SSDs to sufficient time to overwrite the address space twice.
- Switched to more reliable percentile-based latency measurements, rather than Min/Avg/Max.
- In addition to the existing relative performance testing and comparisons, there are absolute performance thresholds which drives must meet in order to pass.
- (currently disabled) MPIO testing for supported configurations will compare Round Robin performance to Fail-over only in order to determine optimal policies for specific drives and firmware versions. Further, the script detects the number of paths to drives through the devcon utility - this can help determine if there is an uneven configuration where a set of drives only has a single path, while other drives have multiple.
- Drive wear is evaluated.
- Switched to the new Diskspd version 2 release which brings a number of improvements over SQLIO.
- Significant improvement to the output report.
Download the script from:
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