Windows 8 Gains Storage Intelligence With Storage Spaces

Now you can mix and match storage devices and see them as a single image in Windows 8.

Steven Sinofsky is back with a lengthy blog update that shows there will be a lot more to Windows 8 than just a pretty interface, thankfully. The way you store data is about to change.

Microsoft is working on a new back-end infrastructure called Storage Spaces that will pool physical disks, which are then carved up into spaces. Sounds like RAID, you say? Well, RAID was never this versatile. 

For starters, you can use a variety of disks in the pool – such as USB-based, SATA, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), and you can use drives of different, mismatched sizes. New disks can be added to a pool at any time and you can put spares in place in case a drive fails. At that point, the spare drive will fill the role of the dead drive.

So it's more like Solaris's ZFS and Linux's btrfs file systems than RAID. You can provision a 10TB space even if you have half that in physical drives, so if you add new drives in the future they are already provisioned. They just go into the pool.

Each space can have its own redundancy policy, with three kinds of fault tolerance; two-way and three-way complete copies of data on different physical disks within the pool, a.k.a. 2-way and 3-way fault tolerance. There is also full rebuilding of data in the event of disk failure for all affected spaces as long as there is enough disk space.

You won't need to run CHKDSK or defrag because Storage Spaces manages all of the drives. Microsoft says Storage Spaces is designed to work with off-the-shelf commodity disks, so there is no need to use RAID enclosures. If anything, a RAID enclosure adds complexity and a performance penalty that does not provide any improvement in reliability, Sinofsky wrote.

Unfortunately, you can't boot from Storage Spaces, so no cobbling together a 10TB C: drive. If you want to know how much space you've actually got left on the different drives, you have to use Power Shell, so you better brush up on what Microsoft is doing with PS in this version of Windows.

Storage Spaces will be a part of both Windows 8 and Windows Server 8 when they ship, which could be this year. Microsoft isn't telling.

• Storage Management
• Microsoft
• management
• Microsoft
• RAID
• storage
• Windows 8