I know that this is a non supported scenario, but some month ago I created a mirror+parity REFS storage tiers on a windows 2016 standalone. I did not receive warnings during the creation about any misconfiguration.
As you can see in google I'm not the only one in that situation. (link)
So I'm not in a standard win2012 storage tiers and nor I'm in space direct.
But the system seems to work well for months!
How can I confirm that data regularly rotate between hot and cold tier? How can I know if the cache space is enough ? How can I know if the SSD tier is too small or even full?
The optimization task is not supported, but in performance monitor, storage spaces counter I see(or it seems) that data continuously rorate between tiers.
dataCollector
This is the powershell script I used
New-StoragePool -StoragePoolFriendlyName "Pool1" -StorageSubSystemFriendlyName (Get-StorageSubSystem).FriendlyName -PhysicalDisks (Get-PhysicalDisk -CanPool $true) -LogicalSectorSizeDefault 512 -FaultDomainAwarenessDefault PhysicalDisk
Set-PhysicalDisk -Friendlyname "WDC WD30EZRX-00MMMB0" -MediaType HDD
New-StorageTier -StoragePoolFriendlyName Pool1 -FriendlyName SSD_Tier -MediaType SSD -ResiliencySettingName Mirror
New-StorageTier -StoragePoolFriendlyName Pool1 -FriendlyName HDD_Tier -MediaType HDD -ResiliencySettingName Parity
$ssd_tier = Get-StorageTier -FriendlyName SSD_Tier
$hdd_tier = Get-StorageTier -FriendlyName HDD_Tier
New-VirtualDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName Pool1 -FriendlyName "DATI" -WriteCacheSize 3GB -StorageTiers @($ssd_tier,$hdd_tier) -StorageTierSizes 249GB, 4560GB
Set-StoragePool -FriendlyName Pool1 -IsPowerProtected $True