Best performance: Windows 10 software striping vs. storage spaces simple

Looking to squeeze a bit more speed out of my development PC for test VMs without necessarily switching to hardware RAID. I've got two identical 2TB SATA-3 data drives (OS is on SSD) so I could rebuild as a Windows 10 striped disk (using disk manager) or create a Windows 10 storage pool with a simple space.

Any suggestions for which would give the best performance? I've always understood that Windows software RAID was pretty poor (although probably better than non-striped) but that was compared to hardware RAID. Can't find much which compares software RAID to storage spaces.

Solution 1:

Performance of single HDD

• this is just our base performance of single drive

Striped dynamic disk over 3 HDDs

• this what you call Windows software RAID

3-column simple Storage Space over the same 3 HDDs

• this is adhoc storage space I made for you with $spaceDisk = New-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName $spaceName -StoragePoolFriendlyName $poolName -NumberOfColumns 3 -NumberOfDataCopies 1 -ResiliencySettingName Simple -ProvisioningType Thin -Size $spaceSize
• the -NumberOfColumns 3 controls the performance

In both test I used three 3 TB Toshiba HDDs (DT01ACA300). The Storage Spaces have bad reputation when it comes to performance, but that is mainly because of really poor performance of parity Storage Space. Striping looks fine as you see.

Note that this is very bad benchmark, it is obvious that Windows cache kicked in for sequential read as there is no way that the 3 disks would attain 1100 MB/s for read. But you can take this numbers and compare them directly to this album.