Windows 8 Storage Spaces

Windows 8 is more than just a Start screen with Live Tiles. The latest installment of Microsoft's operating system hides important changes and tools that were not present in Windows 7. One of the latter, called Storage Spaces, is one of the least known

Storage Spaces is derived from Drive Extender , a tool found in Windows Home Server. Storage spaces allow you to create virtual disk drives, made up of physical disks of a heterogeneous nature (USB, SATA or SAS) and of different capacities, grouped under a single unit logic.

h2. Storage Pools

Each group of disks (Storage Pools) will appear in the system as if it were a physical disk, offering the same functionality for all purposes Depending on the number of disks and the configuration we opted for when creating the group, the storage spaces are also used to to safeguard information against failures in one or more of the units that make up the group, since they act as mirrors of each other.

h2. Creating a storage group

For this article I have chosen two small drives, the kind that end up in a drawer as we replace disks with larger capacity ones, connected to the equipment through ports USB.

Each one is a different size with similar storage capacity, under 100 GB.The idea of ​​the example is to keep the drive where Windows 8 is installed, and add the two extra drives as a virtual drive, where each one is a mirror of the other.

The first thing we are going to do is display the right sidebar (Charms Bar). With the search tool and within System we write "spaces" (without quotes). From the items that appear, we will select “Storage spaces”.

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This action will place us on the traditional desktop in the path “Control Panel” » System and Security> "

We mark the link called “Create a new group and storage spaces”. Now we must select the disks that we are going to use for the storage group. At this point you have to be careful if there are more units in the system, as in the example.

The drive that appears is not the one that hosts the operating system (that will never be in this list), but an internal auxiliary drive. If we mark the wrong drive we will lose all its contents without the possibility of recovery.

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Once the disks have been selected, we will click on the Create group control, at the bottom of that screen. Once the group is created,we will assign it a name, drive letter (the drop-down menu will always show the first available letter other than A or B), and we will choose >."

As for types, the possibilities are: Double Reflection (requires two units), Reflection triple and Parity (the latter two require three disks). Double mirroring offers the least failure protection, but it is more than enough for a home user. For our example, where we only have two units, the choice necessarily falls on Double Reflex .

Regarding the size of the group, the tool informs us of its total and available capacity (the creation of the group consumes space in the units affected). We will also have information on the maximum capacity of the virtual drive.

The maximum capacity can be configured downward, but unless we want to reserve space for another purpose in large units, it is advisable not to modify the value assigned by the systemWhen the settings are to our liking, we will click on the Create storage space control.

At this point, the system proceeds to prepare and format the drives selected for the storage pool. A modal window will indicate the development of the automatic process.

When finished, the system will inform us, if everything has gone correctly, of the availability and composition of the storage group. We will already have the virtual unit prepared to operate with it exactly the same as if it were a physical disk.

To continue with the example, I have copied a folder with images to the virtual drive. After this, I have proceeded to delete the group from the same administration panel shown in the previous image (requires administrator permissions).

If we delete a storage group all data stored in it will be lost and the system will restore the drives used to their original state: NTFS format and MS-DOS-like partition table.When the system takes control of the drives to create a storage space, it transforms the partition table to the GPT type.

Once the effects of deleting the storage group have been verified, I have repeated the steps to create the group again and proceed to the simulation of a drive failure , to check the virtues of the Storage Spaces functionality.

h2. What happens when a drive fails

To simulate a failure I have shut down the system, because USB drives assigned to a group cannot be unmounted, and disconnected from the computer one of the discs. When rebooting the system with one less disk, it boots normally and does not display any kind of warning about such a circumstance.

I took advantage of the hypothetical failure to copy another image to the virtual drive. The system worked normally and the image was saved without problems.

Opening the Storage Spaces tool again, the system has detected that one of the drives is missing, indicating to proceed with its connection . Doing the latter restores the pool normally to its original configuration.

Next, I have turned off the computer again to remove a disk again, which I have connected to another system with Windows 7. From there and with a specific tool to manage partitions, I have deleted the existing ones with GPT partition table and created two new ones with NTFS format, each with 50% of the storage capacity, to simulate a new disk.

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When reinserting the new>adding another disk to the storage space I note here, before adding the new one, that the reference to cannot be removed from the storage pool the drive no longer exists, because the array is created with the Dual Reflection resistor type, which requires two disks as already explained."

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After the drive is added, the system begins to repair the storage pool. In the middle of the repair process, with the new > the reference to the failed unit can be removed The system continues with the repair, reflecting the data on the newly added unit."

After approximately one minute and in a process that is carried out in two phases (the time will logically depend on the capacity of the disks and the information on them), the storage pool is restored and ready to work. The information stored, including the image added in the middle of the failure, has remained safe at all times.

h2. Storage Spaces can continue to grow

Within normal use and without as many tricks as those carried out in the test, when a storage group runs out of capacity, the system will notify us of this circumstance, being able to add more disks to the already created group.With Storage Spaces we can create as many groups as we want, making the storage capacity, in theory, as big as we need.

h2. Windows 8 Storage Spaces, conclusions

Windows 8 storage spaces represent added value for the operating system compared to previous versions. For a normal user who wants to take advantage of old drives, the tool can make them useful again.

In any case, if you decide to create a storage space with the steps explained, please perform the operation carefully. A previous backup will always be advisable Finally and for your curiosity, this is how the storage group looks, seen from the partition management tool that I mentioned .

Image | DijutalTim, Clive Darra