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Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct pros and cons

Vendor: Microsoft

3.8 out of 5

12 reviews
81% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct excels with exceptional technical support, impressive flash tiering, caching, and a remarkable price performance ratio. Ensuring no single point of failure, it offers high availability. Superior performance boosts operations, being three times faster than VMware. However, challenges include limited access to Azure, hardware certification issues, and scalability constraints for setups over two nodes. Documentation and shared cluster support need improvement, as well as performance with NVMe and SATA SSDs.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Flash tiering and caching capabilities are highlighted as amazing, contributing to enhanced performance and reliability.

Technical support for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is recognized as excellent.

There is no single point of failure, ensuring high availability and reliability.

The price performance ratio is highly regarded, offering affordability and efficiency.

Performance is reported as significantly superior, described as three times faster than VMware, positively impacting operations.

CONS

Documentation management and online documentation need significant improvement.

Access to services like Azure is limited, and obtaining hardware compatibility certification is challenging.

More optimization is required for mirroring, and scalability is limited to setups beyond two nodes.

Shared cluster support has been closed, which is a critical concern.

Performance issues arise when supporting both NVMe and SATA SSDs, and improvements are needed.

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Pros review quotes

System Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Jan 26, 2020

The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure.

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NT

Technology Specialist at MyIAN

Feb 13, 2020

The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory.

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Enterprise Architect/Manager at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Mar 19, 2020

It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions.

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Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Free Report: Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Founder, Professional Services Director, Lead Architect at Falcon Consulting

Aug 6, 2020

The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing

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NT

Technology Specialist at MyIAN

Oct 31, 2022

The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable.

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Adolfo Albanell

Owner at ICAL S.A.

Apr 17, 2023

Its technical support is excellent.

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Grzegorz Kedziora

General Manager and CTO at SIIT

Apr 29, 2024

The initial setup is straightforward.

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Stanislaw Mielicki

Solution architect at Netland

Feb 5, 2025

The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct.

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reviewer2588997

Senior Technical Support Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 27, 2025

The main positive impact that Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct has had on my company over the years is increasing performance; our checks show it is three times faster than VMware, making us extremely happy and motivated to keep using it.

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PP

Paul Paraschivescu

Owner at Micronet Systems

Jul 16, 2025

The main advantages are price and performance, and I am happy with the combination.

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Show 1 more reviews (out of 11)

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Cons review quotes

System Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Jan 26, 2020

More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring.

Read full review

NT

Technology Specialist at MyIAN

Feb 13, 2020

I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools.

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Enterprise Architect/Manager at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Mar 19, 2020

It is scalable, but only beyond two nodes. If I go for two nodes it's not scalable. I need to build a complete cluster from the beginning if I'm going for two nodes.

Read full review

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Free Report: Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Founder, Professional Services Director, Lead Architect at Falcon Consulting

Aug 6, 2020

Documentation management could be improved

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NT

Technology Specialist at MyIAN

Oct 31, 2022

The management tool within this solution could be improved. We would also like to be able to access services like Azure when using this solution.

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Adolfo Albanell

Owner at ICAL S.A.

Apr 17, 2023

It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution.

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Grzegorz Kedziora

General Manager and CTO at SIIT

Apr 29, 2024

The integration is not difficult because there is no GUI, but we need to use a PowerShell command. This makes it difficult to monitor and to see the components' statuses.

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Stanislaw Mielicki

Solution architect at Netland

Feb 5, 2025

Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution.

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reviewer2588997

Senior Technical Support Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 27, 2025

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer service and technical support of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct a three, as there were issues that the Microsoft team could not pinpoint, leading to delays in finding solutions.

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PP

Paul Paraschivescu

Owner at Micronet Systems

Jul 16, 2025

There is a lot of room for improvement. I would like to have more tools to monitor the function and problems.

Read full review

Show 1 more reviews (out of 11)

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Popular Comparisons

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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

StarWind Virtual SAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

DataCore SANsymphony vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

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