Is it possible to ask ReFS to use hardware RAID6 for parity calculations?

Question

Does ReFS use FPGA-based XOR engines for RAID parity calculations? If not, is it possible to get it to use such tech?

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/64aff15f-2e34-40c6-a873-2e0da5a355d2/parity-storage-space-so-slow-that-its-unusable?forum=winserver8gen — GregC, Feb 08 '16 at 16:28

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 17 '16 at 09:42

ReFS is much like ZFS in general. They both are completely CPU oriented and do not use anything from hardware RAID controllers.

Other vendors (for example StarWind with LSFS) are using hardware parity RAID offload if present so it's not clear why Microsoft has neglected.

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 16 '16 at 21:20

6

ReFS (and Storage Spaces Direct from Windows Server 2016 if you care) takes care indeed of some hardware offload features present in Intel Xeon CPUs (they somehow refuse to work if f.e. "popcnt" instruction support is missing) for strong hash summing but it doesn't use anything with XOR and polynomial calculations for RAID6 neither from CPUs nor from hardware FGPA XOR engines present on modern RAID controllers.

answered Feb 16 '16 at 21:20

BaronSamedi1958

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Could you provide some links or references? – GregC Feb 17 '16 at 14:54

Is it possible to ask ReFS to use hardware RAID6 for parity calculations?

2 Answers2