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Gavin Coates
Asked: 2017-03-07 01:18:42 +0800 CST

Can I Disable Microsoft Storage Spaces SMP?

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I've just migrated our work server to a new machine, and took the opportunity to upgrade to Windows Server 2016.

Since switching over, I've noticed that the server is using 90% of the 8GB of memory that is installed. When i check what is using the most memory, "Microsoft Storage Spaces SMP" is using over 1GB of memory.

From research, this appears to be a tool that allows you to group hard disks into storage pools. As far as I am aware, we are not doing this.

The server has 4 hard disks - one single hard disk for the OS, and 3 hard disks using hardware RAID5 to create a second, data disk.

So can I disable Microsoft Storage Spaces SMP and free up that memory for more important services?

EDIT: I've now disabled Microsoft Storage Spaces, and performance on the server has increased significantly. Tasks that were previously taking 2 minutes to complete, are now instant. So far there seem to be no ill effects of disabling it, either.

raid windows-server-2016

1 Answers

  1. Storage Spaces overview

    Storage Spaces is a technology in Windows and Windows Server that can help protect your data from drive failures. It is conceptually similar to RAID, implemented in software. You can use Storage Spaces to group three or more drives together into a storage pool and then use capacity from that pool to create Storage Spaces. These typically store extra copies of your data so if one of your drives fails, you still have an intact copy of your data. If you run low on capacity, just add more drives to the storage pool.

    Source

    Since you're using hardware RAID, disabling this service should be fine since this service offers RAID at the OS level (which you probably aren't using). If this were a virtual machine you wouldn't need this service since the VMHost should be running some sort of RAID.

    FWIW, Microsoft maintains a page titled Guidance on disabling system services on Windows Server 2016 with Desktop Experience. Below is the entry for smphost.

    Microsoft Storage Spaces SMP

    Service name: smphost

    Service description: Host service for the Microsoft Storage Spaces management provider. If this service is stopped or disabled, Storage Spaces cannot be managed.

    Installation: Always installed

    StartType: Manual

    Recommendation: Do not disable

    Comments: Storage management APIs fail without this service.

    Example: Get-WmiObject -class MSFT_Disk -Namespace Root\Microsoft\Windows\Storage

    Source

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