Thin provisioning support in storage devices

NTDEV
1

Hi all,
Can anyone tell,whether thin provisioning mode is supported in storage devices(sd card, usb).Where exactly the thin provisioning concept is used?

Thanks in advance

2

>usb).Where exactly the thin provisioning concept is used?

In Storage Spaces in Win8/2012.

–
Maxim S. Shatskih
Microsoft MVP on File System And Storage
xxxxx@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com

3

It’s also a feature of many SAN devices (operating without Spaces).

Peter
OSR

4

I think the thin provisioning concept only makes sense for non-removable media.

5

Thanks for your reply.

Storage device can either be full provisioned or thin provisioned.

  1. Is it possible for the user to change the provisioning mode?
  2. I have checked with many usb pendrive and sd card, all are supporting full provisioning. Is there any storage device with Thin Provisioning enabled?
6

@ Peter:
In SAN devices how exactly the thin provisioning concept is used? Whether the SAN device is used as a RAM or just as a normal storage device (with thin provisioning enabled)?
Whether Sd card and usb devices support thin provisioning?

7

I think your perception of thin provisioning is incorrect. Thin provisioning allows a storage device to expose storage that has not been provisioned. Meaning if you have a 100GB storage device, with thin provisioning, you could expose 10x100GB LUNs (total is 1TB). But ofcourse, you can’t use 1TB because there is only 100GB. Thus, thin provisioning thresholds and other commands to reclaim space. The reason for this is that many end-users overprovision their storage for applications and then have unused and unreachable storage space. TP allows admins to provision as much storage as they *may* need in the future and when their physical storage resources become used, they can simply add more physical storage.

In the SCSI Inquiry response, the SAN devices will set certain BITS (the specifics escape me without reading SPC/SBC specs). These bits notify the OS that certain commands are supported such as GET_LBA_STATUS, UNMAP, XCOPY LITE (copy offload), etc. They also notify whether they are thin provisioned or support thin provisioning and then what thresholds are supported.

If you’re interested in this area, please go to t10.org and download SPC4 and SBC (and maybe SAM also).

~kenny

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of xxxxx@gmail.com
Sent: Monday, September 16, 2013 4:21 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE:[ntdev] Thin provisioning support in storage devices

@ Peter:
In SAN devices how exactly the thin provisioning concept is used? Whether the SAN device is used as a RAM or just as a normal storage device (with thin provisioning enabled)?
Whether Sd card and usb devices support thin provisioning?

NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

Visit the list at: http://www.osronline.com/showlists.cfm?list=ntdev

OSR is HIRING!! See http://www.osr.com/careers

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer