Some chipsets don't work with SSDs very well. So check bing for your laptop + SSD. I would also upgrade RAM when you have it open. If you can max it out, it would help more than an SSD drive.

Hello Paul,

When drives are in the primordial pool, are they visible in disk management?

Yes. When you add new drives, they will appear in both. You can bring the new drives online and initialize them, and they will still be visible in disk management and storage pools. If you create a new volume on a drive using disk management, it will no longer be available to use with storage pools, and will be removed from the primordial pool.

Suppose your OS crashes and has to be reinstalled. What happens to the storage pools and associated storage spaces created under that original OS?

Storage Spaces records information about pools and storage spaces on the physical disks that compose the storage pool. Therefore, your pool and storage spaces are preserved when you move an entire storage pool and its physical disks from one computer to another, or reinstall the operating system.

Windows Server 2012 starts storage that could potentially be shared with a cluster in a safe state. For Storage Spaces, that means the first time Windows connects to a storage pool, the pool starts as read-only and the storage spaces will start in a detached state. To access your data, you must set the storage pool to read-write and then attach the storage spaces.

These steps do not apply to Windows 8 – storage pools start as read-write and storage spaces start as attached.

Great questions, if you need further clarification, let me know.

Thanks for watching,
Mike

@Stan-Goldyn,

I was hoping that someone has been using it in the enterprise. We haven't had any response. There's an irony to your post here. Most business like your company are looking to save money and it's seems Storage Spaces may be a cost effective solution. The irony though is that in a production environment, the cost of the equipment to setup the way you want to for your particular configuration may cost as much is your current researched solution.

check out: http://blogs.technet.com/b/storageserver/archive/2013/10/19/storage-spaces-jbods-and-failover-clustering-a-recipe-for-cost-effective-highly-available-storage.aspx