Windows 8 Storage Spaces to Offer HDD Crash Recovery
Storage Spaces for Windows 8 will allow users to spread a backup copy of the system across two or more connected hard drives.
On Monday new Windows 8 screenshots surfaced providing additional details about a feature leaked back in September called Storage Spaces. Based on the images, it will be found within the Control Panel and require at least two hard drives, allowing consumers to quickly restore their system if the primary hard drive suddenly crashes.
"Use Storage Spaces to help protect yourself from a drive failure," reads the service's description. "You first need to create a storage pool of two or more drives, and then you can create Storage Spaces from the free pool capacity."
As described, the user first selects each drive locally attached to the motherboard and then hits the "Create" button. After that, the Storage Space can be assigned a name and a drive letter. There's also an option to set the pool's provisioned size, and a means to determine how much space can actually be reserved.
According to the images, a 2-way Mirror Space stores two copies of the user's files and can tolerate one drive failure. A 3-way Mirror Space stores three copies and can tolerate two drive failures -- this latter method is actually more fault tolerant but comes with the cost of using more pool capacity to store a third copy.
As an example, the screens depict a 2-way Mirror setup with one drive setting 930 GB aside and a second drive setting aside 595 GB of space, totaling a Storage Space size of 2 GB. Storage Spaces will also visually keep track of the drives' overall health, and offer an option to rename each if needed.
With CES 2012 just around the corner, we expect to hear more about this feature -- along with additional Windows 8 details -- next month. In the meantime, check out the full batch of Storage Spaces screenshots here.
Hmmmm i'll have to look at it some more when it becomes available.
Don't most motherboard chipsets provide RAID 1 or even RAID 5 these days?
most likely it only focuses on backup of the system.
A bit confusing since apparently you can use different sized drives...so maybe same sized pools? Kind of like a virtual drive spanning across 2+ drives?
Yes, but would your average user understand the first thing about implementing one of those controllers? I doubt it. This is a good basic solution for your average user, not a regular Tom's Hardware subscriber like you and me.
WOW! Now THAT'S what I call compression!
No, compression is those 32KB 1080p movies! Just got to download that legit_codec_pack.exe to reap the benefits.
We all here are more technical and you all seem to forget it.
It's not a replacement or alternative to RAID or anything, it's a simplified way to keep your data backed up in a re-storable state for your average PC owner.
While it's very unclear how the thing is supposed to work, it definitely doesn't involve absurd math like the one in the article. The screenshot clearly says this is the used space on the the volume, not the capacity.
That was exactly my first thought. That sounds like DE at heart, with a twitch of Greyhole in it for good measure (DE was limited to one copy, GH allows at least three).
I do wonder if they use the 1st-gen DE implementation or the 2nd-gen (only on VAIL betas) one: the VAIL implementation took an extra 20% hit compared to WHSv1, but it allowed for error/consistency checking in the pooled data.
As for how it works, it's rather simple: the maximum pool size (that is, how much data can be fitted into the "Storage Space") is the sum of the reserved HDD space (so, with a 3-copy Storage Space and 1GB reserved for each disk, it would show as 3GB total storage), actual usable space would be 1GB (or 800MB, if they're using the 2nd-gen implementation of the DE engine), and used space would be shown as 3 times the actual data put into it (so, a 50MB file would report as 150MB used).
This, however, seems to be an early implementation. Showing all available space made sense in WHSv1, since all drives were pooled together and you chose to duplicate them or not; but as Storage Spaces are in fact "mini" DE implementations with duplication always enabled, Microsoft might want to simplify how storage area is shown, so as not to cause confusion (as it seems to be causing right now).
Cheers.
Miguel
maybe a more user friendly raid 1?