Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

Microsoft and StarWind are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Microsoft is ranked #9 with an average rating of 7.8, while StarWind is ranked #1 with an average rating of 9.3. Microsoft holds a 7.3% mindshare in SDS, compared to StarWind’s 6.1% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of StarWind users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

StarWind Virtual SAN and Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct are two leading solutions in the hyper-converged infrastructure space, both competing to provide efficient storage virtualization. StarWind seems to have the upper hand in terms of user satisfaction with a simpler setup, while Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct offers strong integration with Hyper-V but may be more complex to configure.

Features: StarWind Virtual SAN is praised for its active-active high availability, interoperability across various platforms, and ease of use. Users appreciate its performance, reliability, and support. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is known for its robust integration with Hyper-V environments, providing a seamless experience for Windows Server users.

Room for Improvement: Users of StarWind Virtual SAN suggest improvements in documentation, the addition of more intuitive monitoring tools, and automation simplifications for tasks like iSCSI management. The need for a web-based management interface is also mentioned. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct could benefit from better integration transparency, improved hardware compatibility verification, and a more intuitive graphical user interface, as reflected in user feedback.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StarWind Virtual SAN is valued for its straightforward deployment in both on-premises and private cloud environments, complemented by proactive technical support and comprehensive setup guidance. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, although offering strong performance post-deployment, tends to require more advanced technical expertise during the installation and configuration processes, particularly in hybrid setups.

Pricing and ROI: StarWind Virtual SAN is recognized for its cost-effectiveness, competitive pricing, and favorable licensing model, providing ROI through efficient use of existing hardware and minimal setup costs. In contrast, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, despite being integrated into Windows Server licensing, often incurs higher operational costs due to hardware requirements and the potential need for advanced technical support.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. StarWind Virtual SAN Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

September 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.1%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is 7.3%, up from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 6.1%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
StarWind Virtual SAN	6.1%
Pure Storage FlashBlade	4.1%
Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct	7.3%
Other	82.5%

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

MikaelHellström

IT Manager at Regin Dalarna

Has handled backup storage needs reliably and supports seamless upgrades

In environments requiring high throughput and low latency, Pure Storage FlashBlade provides high throughput and normal latency, but we do not have any application that requires low latency right now, so the latency of three to five milliseconds is considered kind of high. Pure Storage FlashBlade's ability to integrate with enterprise applications is not important for us, as we only want to present an S3 bucket for our backup, which we have done, and it works very fast. We use the Purity software's data reduction techniques; we have a backup software that compresses everything before sending it to the S3 bucket, achieving a data reduction of 1.1 to one. I would recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other companies because it's a very fast and scalable solution for anyone who needs it. On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution an 8.

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Stanislaw Mielicki

Solution architect at Netland

Achieve cost-effectiveness with superior performance while needing to address cluster support

I am working with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct for applications, SQL, and VRS. I am an integrator for this solution The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct. They introduced the All-Flash array using SSD or NVMe drives without cache drives. It is…

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Vladimir Simion

Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer

Achieving seamless cost-saving implementation with exceptional support

The best features that StarWind Virtual SAN offers include the price because comparing to other virtual SAN solutions, this one is the best, and it also has a great support team behind it. My experience with their support has been positive, as their guides regarding the integration are very useful. They have some awesome guides online that show you exactly how to configure the product, how to do the initial setup, and you can speak with them directly. They will be able to connect and verify your setup, run its parameters and see exactly what's working and what is not, and they really help you with that. StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization and my customer through initial cost saving. They use this product in a dark site, so I'm not able to provide any additional details about this, but they were really glad about it, they're still using it, and they asked for extending the capacity for it and the support. They really want to use it and are enjoying using it.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The snapshots, replication, and the ability to have immutable blades are the most valuable features. You're putting data snapshots out in those blades, and they cannot be touched. Its performance is great."

"The ease of deployment and management has helped us simplify our storage. We also do not have to worry about capacity management as much. A lot of these things are native to Pure Storage."

"I would rate this solution an eight plus. It has has good flexibility and stability, it's easy to manage and the response time is good."

"I would rate Pure Storage FlashBlade a ten out of ten."

"I like its size. It is smaller than the other competitors. We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte."

"Approximately 40% to 50% of my time is saved using Pure Storage FlashBlade compared to different products."

"The most valuable features are the Metro clustering, and disaster recovery."

"The most valuable features of FlashBlade include its replication capabilities, reports, and easy allocation. Everything is user-friendly."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

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

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct pros

"The most valuable features of StarWind Virtual SAN include its cost-effective repurposing of older hardware, seamless integration with vSphere, and high scalability."

"The product only requires two VMWare ESXi host servers versus three host servers for VMware's comparable solution."

"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."

"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."

"The feature I have found most valuable in VSAN is its high availability capability."

"The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."

"Although StarWind Virtual SAN free is fully functional and can be used in production, the support that comes with the license is priceless."

"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pros

Cons

"Commvault has mainly driven the Analytics, providing data and reports. However, the product has room for improvement, especially regarding storage analytics. Upgrading firmware has caused issues, requiring feature disabling to revert to traditional backups. The firmware upgrades sometimes affect Commvault backups."

"The technical support needs to improve. When we open a case, it is auto assigned to a support tech person. Nine out of ten times, we get an email right back saying that person is off until tomorrow. I cannot handle that. They just did this over the weekend to us, too. I had to call our rep and have them do something about it."

"It usually comes down to just what you hit and the value you're getting when you spend the money and license the products. I would always go, "If you want to make things better, lower your price and make your licensing simpler." There's always an opportunity around that."

"I would like to see the licensing fees improved as well as the price per terabytes."

"We initially encountered challenges with the assembly process due to issues with the documentation required during setup, an area where Pure Storage needs improvement."

"The feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services."

"I would like to see better integration."

"In my opinion, one way Pure Storage FlashBlade can be improved is by having more compatibility between the FlashArray and FlashBlade, allowing for synchronized data between both platforms."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

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

"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."

"Documentation management could be improved"

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

"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."

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

"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."

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

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct cons

"If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume."

"The interface of the management console of the StarWind Virtual SAN is complex, and it's difficult for the novice user to interact with the management having less knowledge or training in the product."

"There should be some kind of active monitoring connected to StarWind vSAN, so you will be able to act when needed."

"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."

"StarWind doesn't really have any performance reporting, especially compared with other vSAN products we've used."

"At this moment, I have not seen a return on investment with StarWind Virtual SAN."

"It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."

"I would like to see improvements in the documentation area."

More StarWind Virtual SAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I understand that it is competitively priced compared to other brands."

"Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."

"The pricing is relatively expensive due to the FlashBlade technology. However, for companies needing quick and reliable data access, the cost is justified."

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."

"The price could be cheaper."

"The product is very expensive."

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

"The price is a little high."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"Cost-wise the product is one of the more affordable within the category of products."

"The solution is expensive."

"With the data center licensing and everything that is connected to that, this solution is relatively costly."

"There are two tiers of support and in my opinion, support is worth the cost."

"The StarWind VSAN business model is very cost-effective."

"The cost was ultimately low to implement, which allowed us to be 3-2-1 complaint."

"The pricing is more than reasonable."

"If you are looking at a traditional SAN for a small cluster, give StarWind vSAN because you will save thousands without any compromise."

"The setup cost, pricing, and licensing are very straightforward. They are exactly what you expect."

"I think that purchasing StarWind Virtual SAN Professional Edition would be optimal for most."

"I would suggest that you download the free version, deploy in your lab, and play with it."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	21

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	3

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	162
Midsize Enterprise	54
Large Enterprise	33

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

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How does VMware vSAN compare with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is bes...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Overall, I find the cost of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct to be affordable for the on-prem Windows pure solution, b...

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What needs improvement with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Microsoft should improve the management aspect of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, as we have raised multiple recomme...

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What do you like most about StarWind Virtual SAN?

It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combin...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for StarWind Virtual SAN was okay.

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What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?

Currently, StarWind Virtual SAN is working perfectly fine, so there are no changes I would suggest.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 19% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 7% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

VMware vSAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 56% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 17% of the time

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 8% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 4% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 4% of the time

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Competitors

VMware vSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 19% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 16% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 12% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Gluster Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 5% of the time

More StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

October 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

October 2025

Download Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN

October 2025

Download StarWind Virtual SAN product report

Also Known As

No data available

MS Storage Spaces Direct

StarWind SAN & NAS

Overview

FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.

Pure Storage

Storage Spaces Direct uses industry-standard servers with local-attached drives to create highly available, highly scalable software-defined storage at a fraction of the cost of traditional SAN or NAS arrays. Its converged or hyper-converged architecture radically simplifies procurement and deployment, while features like caching, storage tiers, and erasure coding, together with the latest hardware innovation like RDMA networking and NVMe drives, deliver unrivaled efficiency and performance.

Microsoft

StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

StarWind

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL

Acuutech, Quest Technology Management, Bradley, Mead & Hunt

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

September 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

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