It's IMMENSELY slow. I was having loading problems and all sorts of mess trying to get the Storage Space to load my game.
Also Driver: San Francisco seems really uncooperative with Windows 8. Even the installer I had to tell to run in Windows 7 mode (and then it wouldn't start, though that might be related to the above issue).
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. While I would not expect it to make things better than a single drive, I would not expect it to make things worse.
What is your storage spaces config like? How many drives, what type of stripe setup?
I was just using no mirroring across 3 drives (2 640 GB and a 1 2TB).
I am suspicious one of my drives is bad for a reason not related to this but for the moment I broke up the storage space and will try running everything as individual drives for the time being (to test how quickly the read/write is if I'm not putting them into a consolidated drive system).
storage space can be slower than individual drives. storage space is more about data integrity and protection than pure performance. just like how you can have a RAID setup for performance or for data integrity (or for both which requires a lot of drives).
that said, I doubt Storage Spaces is the reason behind solidsonic's problems. it's most likely having to do with the game and the way it's configured.
here's an excerpt from the aforementioned article regarding performance:
To test read and write speed, we put together a 15GB folder of files. We copied the files three times and then averaged the amount of time it took to ensure accuracy—to establish a baseline for performance, we first copied that folder from the computer’s local hard drive to one of the external hard drives. We then copied the same files to two of the drives set up in two-way mirroring mode, and then again to three of the drives configured to use parity mode. Three-way mirroring, which requires five drives, was skipped because our system had only three USB 3.0 ports.
These graphs show just how slow writing to Storage Spaces can be—it takes a little under twice the amount of time to copy files to a mirrored storage space than to a bare drive, and it takes about four times that amount to copy files to a space in parity mode.
When copying to a drive without Storage Spaces enabled, speeds are consistently just above 100MB/s.
In mirrored mode, things start out at around 100MB/s, but quickly drop off and hover between 40MB/s and 60MB/s.
This same effect is even more pronounced in parity mode, which starts at 100MB/s but then drops to around 25MB/s.
So, in actuality, if you're just making relatively small writes to your storage spaces, you shouldn't notice much performance degradation: copying files to mirrored and parity mode spaces is just as fast as a normal file copy for a short amount of time. It wouldn't surprise me if this was an intentional decision on Microsoft's part to keep things speedy for people only making light use of their storage spaces.