Killer Win8 Feature: Storage Spaces

[Ddrak]

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012 ... iency.aspx

Pretty heavy geek going, but basically it lets you take an arbitrary number of disks and mush them together into a single large fault-tolerant array that you can add to later. Prior to reading that I wasn't so keen, now I can't wait.

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Nice. But didn't Windows already have something similar? I want to say "stripe sets" which I believe is different from RAID or JBOD... It's been years since I've done anything tricky with storage though. But I'm assuming that whatever this new feature is takes drive arrays to a whole new level.

The Windows 8 tablets might be enough to bring me off the fence for a tablet too!

[Ddrak]

Yeah, Windows supported RAID but this is more than that. You can add new drives or replace smaller drives with bigger ones at any time without reformatting (and maintaining a single visible "drive"). Instead of having to manage which drive I put stuff on, I can just create a storage space and fill it up. If I run out of room, just buy another drive and the space is magically bigger.

You can thin provision as well, but I haven't quite figured out why you'd want to given it's expandable anyway.

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

I think you can stripe set different size drives already but I'm pretty sure you have to format the "drive" every time you change its configuration. It sounds like they took this several steps forward.

I assume you are looking at some beta or tech preview of Win 8? From MSDN?

[Ddrak]

Nah - all in the link in my first post. Ars has a good summary here: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2 ... or-all.ars

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Nice. And hmmm I don't see it on MSDN.

[Ddrak]

It's just the blog linked in my first post. They say it won't be available until beta.

Dd