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StarWind Storage Appliance vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.0
StarWind Storage Appliance users saw reduced costs, improved performance, and increased efficiency, with easy scalability and high reliability.
Sentiment score
7.2
StarWind Virtual SAN cuts costs and downtime, enhancing ROI with high performance and savings on hardware and consulting.
We don't sell a lot of redundant servers, so it's not a massive ROI, but the ability to rely on their technical support and the software's ease of setup allows us to reduce labor costs and go to market competitively.
Regarding cost savings, for my client, it was about 20K USD for his specific use and as for extending capacity, StarWind made that process easy.
We saw that the cost was paid for within 18 months since moving to StarWind.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
9.0
StarWind Storage Appliance customer service is praised for 24x7 troubleshooting, professionalism, high technical support ratings, and helpful videos.
Sentiment score
8.1
StarWind's customer service is praised for promptness, expertise, and exceptional support, ensuring smooth operations and positive client experiences.
Even in the instances where my technical team does not have the ability to manage or troubleshoot or resolve an issue, StarWind's technical team supports and resolves on our behalf very quickly.
Customer support is great. They connected to my setup, verified it, validated it, and even improved it with small adjustments and everything went smoothly.
On the occasions when they have been needed to be engaged, they've been really knowledgeable on the product and remote in on several occasions to resolve issues very quickly.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
StarWind Storage Appliance is scalable, adaptable, hardware-independent, supports unlimited storage, and is effective in standalone and hyperconverged environments.
Sentiment score
7.7
StarWind Virtual SAN is praised for seamless scalability and flexible licensing, accommodating various business needs efficiently.
I believe that scalability should be further improved, especially considering the possibility that environments may grow exponentially.
I have never needed to scale up or add additional nodes with StarWind Virtual SAN, but we have had to expand, and customer support has been excellent.
StarWind Virtual SAN's scalability is good, and I have had an easy experience adding more space to the system.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.9
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for stability, robust performance, and high user ratings, especially on well-maintained Windows OS.
Sentiment score
8.5
StarWind Virtual SAN is praised for its stability, reliability, and efficient performance across diverse hardware, ensuring minimal downtime.
It has been working for five years and the customer is still happy with it.
I ran it on a two-node Hyper-V cluster setup, and I didn't experience any unexpected crashes or major issues.
In my experience, StarWind Virtual SAN is very stable, and I have never had a single instability issue.
 

Room For Improvement

StarWind Storage Appliance requires improved integration, easier setup, better insights, and feature parity between demo and paid versions.
StarWind Virtual SAN requires better documentation, automation, interface, network configuration, feature trials, pricing, cloud integration, and enhanced storage management.
A more intuitive interface or an improved dashboard for monitoring the cluster would also be helpful, as it would facilitate performance tracking and help identify potential issues before they affect services.
There have been cases where not understanding exactly what's failing on the Virtual SAN has been an issue.
Limited feedback in the management GUI is the main area where I would like to see StarWind Virtual SAN get better.
 

Setup Cost

StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its affordability, straightforward licensing, and excellent value compared to competitors for SMEs.
StarWind Virtual SAN is praised for competitive pricing, low setup costs, simple licensing, and excellent price/performance for SMBs.
The costs are acceptable and very competitive compared to other hardware-only HCI solutions.
I talked to the sales team, they gave me a quote with a perpetual license with the support and everything went through smoothly.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was that it was easy to implement, license, and the cost was very good.
 

Valuable Features

StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its user-friendly interface, high performance, reliability, excellent support, affordability, and robust data protection.
StarWind Virtual SAN excels with high availability, ease of use, cost reduction, and robust support, ideal for SMBs and enterprises.
StarWind Virtual SAN helps us keep customer satisfaction and provides the solutions we need without having to hire many IT specialists.
The ease of implementation was important for my team because it saved us a lot of time and research, and we didn't have to do anything other than just install the software and we were up and running in a few minutes.
StarWind's storage virtualization and failover capabilities have made a difference for my clusters through uptime improvements, with zero downtime specific to server host maintenance or even maintenance of the StarWind software itself.
 

Categories and Ranking

StarWind Storage Appliance
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
NAS (16th), All-Flash Storage (30th)
StarWind Virtual SAN
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
198
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st), HCI (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. StarWind Storage Appliance is designed for NAS and holds a mindshare of 0.8%, up 0.8% compared to last year.
StarWind Virtual SAN, on the other hand, focuses on Software Defined Storage (SDS), holds 6.4% mindshare, down 8.8% since last year.
NAS
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
 

Featured Reviews

Kishore CA - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes.
The only drawback is that it takes a bit of time during initial synchronization, especially after restarting the environment. This is a potential area of improvement. There's a synchronization time, but it takes time. Initially, when we start the first environment deployment, it starts synchronizing between the storage. So, it is taking time. One thing is that even when you restart. Let's assume that the synchronization is completed and the storage is synchronized. Both storages are fully synchronized, and it is in sync mode. Now, if we want to restart both nodes, there is a case for maintenance purposes. You took both nodes for maintenance, and we rebooted it. Then, it should not synchronize again. It should be a checksum. And if there is a checksum match, there should be no synchronization again. So, one thing that should be taken care of. Another thing is that I used freeware- the community version, free license, which we deployed using PowerShare. In that case, it was very difficult to bring back another node when one node was faulty. Let's assume that both the nodes are working fine. And we found one node faulty. And we destroyed all the volumes in that and tried to bring it back. So that was a difficult factor. The final solution is that we were not able to bring back the failed node. So, we reconstructed a new data source for that. That is another drawback. In future releases, I would like to see the integration with VMware or some other things as a plugin model for VMware.
Vladimir Simion - PeerSpot reviewer
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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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about StarWind Storage Appliance?
I would say data protection and easy management are the most valuable features of the product...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.
What needs improvement with StarWind Storage Appliance?
StarWind Storage Appliance's demo version should be similar to the paid one.
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) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” acce...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
I had experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing through using the free version of StarWind Virtual SAN for testing purposes, so there was no cost involved during my evaluation. That made i...
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
One area for improvement regarding StarWind Virtual SAN is the lack of a full-feature trial. At the time I tested it, I had access only to the free version, which required using PowerShell scripts ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
StarWind SAN & NAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Bosch, EC2 IT, Solid Earth Inc., Canon
Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind Storage Appliance vs. StarWind Virtual SAN and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.