Hybrid Storage Setup on "normal" hardware

Question

I am rebuilding my workstation to install Windows Server 2012, up from 2008 R2, and I am looking at the storage subsystem as a place of change... The current setup is as follows

• Boot: 2 10k RPM Western Digital Velociraptors in RAID 0
• Large Storage: 4 1Tb drives in a mix of RAID 1 (important stuff) and just standard drives
• Fast Storage: 2 10K RPM SAS Disks in RAID 0

What i am looking at is taking the 4 1Tb drives and the 2 SAS disks and adding them to a "pool" of storage, something like what Apple have in Fusion Drive. The more used files should be served from the 10k RPM drives, and the lesser used files from the standard disks...

I know Windows Server 2012 has Storage Spaces, but there has been no mention of mixing Fast and Slow disks... So, Is it possible? Or should i just create a Storage Pool of the 2 SSDs as Fast storage and the rest of the 1Tb drives as Large storage?

Note: I will probably change the 2 Velociraptors to RAID 1, but thats out of scope for this question, unless this magic pool can also be used for booting....

[UPDATE] when i mentioned "normal" hardware in the title, i forgot to mention that my Mother Board has no magic to make a hybrid drive, and the hard drives are standard drives, not drives with SSDs added...

Answer 1

I have been looking into this for the last few days and have come up with a possible solution... Based on this thread on HardForum about a Windows 2012 SAN there is an option to move your Journal to a separate disk I will use the 2 Velociraptors as boot drives, the 4 1Tb drives in a Storage Spaces pool, the 2 10RPM SAS disks as Journal Drives and FancyCache to make things all work a little faster (or a lot faster!). I have been playing with FancyCache for the last few days and it seems to work well...