One of the coolest thing is that you can carve a large storage space without even having the total amount of physical disk capacity, and later on you can add more drives when you start getting low on capacity. Fault tolerance is built right in to the feature if you have two or more drives in the storage pool. You’ll be able to create storage spaces that won’t lose information when a drive fails, or two if you have three or more drives. Physical media don’t even need to match in size or interface, which means that you can use SATA, USB, and SAS hard drives of 250GB, 1TB, 4TB or any other size and mix them up in any way you want.
Requirements
One or more internal or external drives; this is in addition to the drive that has the Windows 8 installation.
Instructions
Follow these step-by-step instructions to create a storage space in Windows 8.
Connect or install all drives that you want to use with “Storage Spaces” to your computer.
Hit , go to the Start screen, type and select Storage Spaces.
Click on the Create a new pool and storage space link.
Pick the drives you like to include, and then click Create pool.
Now configure the new storage space, choose a name, drive letter. In Resiliency choose the form of protection, Windows 8 Storage Spaces offer four types:
Simple (no resiliency) or no protection, the drive fails and you’ll lose all the data, you can prevision future space and add more drive later. Two-way mirror, requires at least 2 drives, and it keeps two copies of your data. Three-way mirror, requires at least 3 drives, and it keeps three copies of your data, helping to protect you from 2 simultaneous drive failure. Parity (or software RAID 5), requires at least 3 drives, it writes your data with parity information, helping you to protect from a single drive failure, and allows to increase the physical storage, which is double from the three-way mirror type.
Enter the maximum size of capacity that you’ll allow it to grow, and then finish by clicking Create storage space.
Once the drive(s) have been formatted and configured, you can access the new storage from Windows Explorer. If everything is working the way it should, you’ll see a green flag and the word “Okay” like in the image below.
Things to keep in mind
When using Windows 8 Storage Spaces consider these things:
The maximum size of a storage space must be 63 TB or smaller. You can change the name or drive letter of the ‘space’ at any time. You can increase the capacity of the ‘pool’ at any time, but you cannot decrease the size of it — Make sure you provision accordingly.
For more information read this previous article — Storage Spaces is the New Disk Pooling Feature for Windows 8 [All You Need to Know]. All content on this site is provided with no warranties, express or implied. Use any information at your own risk. Always backup of your device and files before making any changes. Privacy policy info.
