Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs Pure Storage FlashBlade comparison

Microsoft and Pure Storage are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Microsoft is ranked #9 with an average rating of 7.8, while Pure Storage is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.8. Microsoft holds a 7.4% mindshare in SDS, compared to Pure Storage’s 4.4% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Pure Storage users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Storage Spaces Di...

Read 11 Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct reviews

4,062 Views
1,462 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Read 38 Pure Storage FlashBlade reviews

5,202 Views
780 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Microsoft Storage Spaces Di...

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and Pure Storage FlashBlade based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade

July 2025

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Helped 865,484 peers since 2012

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

Microsoft Storage Spaces Di...

Ranking in Software Defined Storage (SDS)

9th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Ranking in Software Defined Storage (SDS)

8th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

All-Flash Storage (15th), File and Object Storage (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is 7.4%, up from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.4%, up from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

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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Eric Black

Solutions Architect at Recovery Point Systems

The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us

The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.

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

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

"The initial setup is straightforward."

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

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

"Its technical support is excellent."

"The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct pros

"The initial setup was straightforward. If you know how to plug in power and network you're pretty much qualified. They were on site to configure the network, the box to fit into our network architecture. Other than that, we self-managed from there."

"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 solution provides many controllers."

"We can capacity plan at a greater level than we used to."

"It has also helped to simplify storage for us in the way that it's easy to manage. Their automatic monitoring really helps when things break or are about to break. They see a problem coming and alert us even before our own system does."

"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."

"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."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is user-friendly. It's replication feature is great because it has active replication and active DR. That's the beauty of the product. It's a perfect solution for block storage."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

Cons

"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."

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

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

"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."

"The integration is not difficult because there is no GUI, but we need to use a PowerShell command. This makes it difficult to monitor and to see the components' statuses."

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

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct cons

"In terms of scalability, it doesn't expand out quite as robustly as some of the others, but it covers 90% of the market in what it does."

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

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

"In the realm of micro-services, I think that Pure Storage can do well if they start getting in there and making their arrays more micro-services ready."

"I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution."

"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 also like to see better support for CIFS workloads."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade should improve on more cloud integration."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"The solution is expensive."

"In my opinion, we have paid the right price for the product. I don't think that it is too much or too little."

"The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate."

"Licensing fees are paid yearly."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

"The price could be cheaper."

"I feel that the price could always be lowered."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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 best suited for small- to medium-sized organizations. It is easy to create load bal...

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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, but I find the Azure Local to be a bit expensive, especially due to hidden costs ...

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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 recommendations but they often refer us to use Microsoft Arc instead of Windows Admin C...

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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 outages when we need to quickly move data between different data centers. It ensure...

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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 past, but one benefit is that they have built-in ransomware protection. Approximate...

See all answers

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 bit complex to understand. You have to understand it more deeply because it's hard...

See all answers

Comparisons

VMware vSAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 59% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 16% of the time

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 7% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 6% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 4% of the time

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Competitors

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 19% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

August 2025

Download Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct product report

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

August 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Also Known As

MS Storage Spaces Direct

No data available

Overview

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

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

Sample Customers

Acuutech, Quest Technology Management, Bradley, Mead & Hunt

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

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade

July 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

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