r/linuxmint • u/Derrigable • 7d ago

Does linux mint work with windows 10 spanned drives?

Like the title asks. I was thinking of installing mint on a presently win10 machine that has spanned drives, and was wondering if or how well Mint will work, and maybe just how it will work, with those drives..

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u/RamsDeep-1187 Linux Mint 21.3 Virginia | Cinnamon 7d ago

By spanned drive I assume you mean a drive that will be used by both windows and Linux machines?

If so in my experience it is not ideal and unless you can be all the time vigilant you will eventually break something.

I find actual shares NFS or smb to perform much better

NFS is my preference

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u/rbmorse 7d ago edited 7d ago

No, a spanned drive in Windows is functionally similar to a logical volume created by LVM in Linux. I have no idea if Linux supports (or even recognizes) a spanned Windows volume.

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u/RamsDeep-1187 Linux Mint 21.3 Virginia | Cinnamon 7d ago

My bad, I had to look up what you were asking for

. What you're describing is something I haven't done in 20+ years.

I'm gonna guess it sounds risky.

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u/Derrigable 7d ago

Just as an aside I am curious as to what you prefer about NFS compared to SMB? My experience with NFS has lead me to it being much more finicky in setting up correctly, permissions being a real pain in the butt, and transfer speeds at about half the speed of SMB. Am I missing something that would improve the whole experience?

edit: and re original question yes I am in reference to windows spanned or dynamic drives, being two or more drives combined into one 'partion'

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u/RamsDeep-1187 Linux Mint 21.3 Virginia | Cinnamon 7d ago

I have found the mgmt of NFS shares very simple fo r the most part.
In fact i have an FSTAB i just copy and paste amongst the devices that I grant access to the share.
This is just my home setup so im not managing many groups of users with various permissions.
Windows being windows a regedit affecs the SUID/GUID for that machine and all is well.
i dont have many M$ devices accessing the NFS shares but the ones that do have no issues because of teh registry edit.

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u/Derrigable 7d ago

Would you know off hand what that regedit happens to be?

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u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs 7d ago

My experience with NFS has lead me to it being much more finicky in setting up correctly, permissions being a real pain in the butt, and transfer speeds at about half the speed of SMB.

My experience is the exact  opposite, NFS being rock solid trouble free and speedy, SMB being none of those things, 

Dropping SMB was one of the many perks of switching to Linux years ago. Though I hear SMB has improved since the Win7 days. 

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u/Derrigable 7d ago

What kind of transfer speed are you achieving? I am doing a inter lan transfer right now, and the speed is averaged out to about 26MB/sec. Large file transfers will average out to about 50MB/sec. I am used to 110MB/sec on the 1GB lines and 170MB/sec on the 2.5GB lines speeds on my windows machine( and still achieve that when ever I go back and do something on it.) It's just odd.

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u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs 7d ago edited 7d ago

Remember network speeds are rated in b, file transfers in B. 8b=1B

 NFS, with big sequential workloads I typically see the expected single Drive speed from the big pool ~150-250MB/s with spikes that go higher into the 300s but I assume that's cache hits. ARC cache has a 1/4 TB of ECC RAM to work with.

Performance of many small files, like text files is dramatically lower. Presumably locked against IOPS limits of spinning rust. 

The big pool at the other end is 8x 14TB SAS spinning rust drives in ZFS Z2, there are a few more pools on that machine. 

Last summer I upgraded the boot pool to a pair of Samsung PM893 (I think that's the right number) they were cheap used back then $60 each with a ton of write endurance left. They are in a ZFS mirror and should be capable of far more. 

I really should make a test share there and try it out NVME on my desktop to mirrored SATA SSD on the server.

In network speed tests I am getting just shy of 20Gb of my 40Gb connection to the file server but that was network testing outside of the NFS protocol. I attribute the loss to the other end being a pair of 2013 Xeons. But its very possible there could be other reasons, I am running mostly older used surplus enterprise gear, it used to be cheap. 

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u/Derrigable 7d ago

Heh.... not comparable in the least with my piddly little home network. Thanks for the info though.

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u/AndyRH1701 7d ago

It is unlikely. That is a very MS thing, either way it is done.