Windows 8 Storage Spaces feature plays nicely with ReFS

By Tom Warren, on 5th Dec 11 9:53 am with 19 Comments

Screenshots of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Storage Spaces feature leaked to the Internet on Monday

Storage Spaces in Windows 8 will link up with Microsoft’s new Resilient File System (ReFS) to create a new level of redundancy in Windows 8. Microsoft’s new Storage Spaces feature of Windows 8 will automatically correct any data that has become corrupted over the various Pool Drives in a particular data set. The feature is similar to software RAID but can utilise Microsoft’s ReFS for increased redundancy.

Storage Spaces screenshots were posted by PCBeta on Monday and demonstrate the setup process for the feature. According to our own sources, Storage Spaces will only be present in Server versions of Windows 8, with the possibility of the feature making its way to high-end client SKUs. Microsoft will support petabyte data set sizes with Storage Spaces and ReFS.

Storage Spaces in Windows 8

  • http://twitter.com/Nero3000 Neerav Patel

    Excellent, might finally upgrade my Windows Home Server box now.

    • Oiler_head

      I was going to upgrate my WHS v1 to WHS v2 but with Storage Spaces on the horizon, I think I’ll wait to see wht impact this has on WHSv3, if there is indeed a WHSv3…

  • Anonymous

    “Storage Spaces will only be present in Server versions of Windows 8″
    damn!

  • http://davepermen.net davepermen

    there’s hope for the next home server, i guess, then :)

  • Asds

    Cool…..

  • Anonymous

    I guess we now know the real reason why Drive Extender was ripped out of WHS.

    • Anonymous

      it is not the same. this is local.

    • Anonymous

      Meaning?

    • http://davepermen.net davepermen

      i guess he means one was for shares, this one is for disks locally, too.

      but yes, i guess this is the evolution of the concept of DE.

  • GP007

    So isn’t storage spaces basically what they took out of the first version of Windows Home Server?   We’re talking about data pools and if the HDD sizes can be different then it sounds just like it, only better.

    • http://thounsell.co.uk/ Thomas Hounsell

      It’s a fair bit more complex than Drive Extender, that just merged multiple physical drives into one logical drive. This has levels of redundancy, so one drive can actually fail with no data loss.

  • Ndisposable

    I hope this will be something like ZFS, altho I don’t know when and if ever I’m going to replace my FreeBSD media center/torrent and file server with nearly 8 TB storage in raid-z2.

  • Guest

    To echo all the previous comments about Drive Extender being ripped from WHS v2.  How much negativity and analyst comment & speculation could have been avoided if they’d said that something big was coming in the Server 8 timeframe that would eventually find its way (we assume) into WHS v3 and that as difficult as it was DE had to go in v2.

    • Anonymous

      I suspect because there’s no way that the big honking Windows Server folks would let their new baby be announced in conjunction with an insignificant little upstart like WHS. I’m paraphrasing, but you get my point.

    • Guest

      The Server folks are the ones who backed WHS in the first place. The person who pushed it had tried three times previously across several groups, including Windows and the hardware unit.

    • Ndisposable

      They said many times – they learned from Longhorn, so now they’ll announce features that are set in stone and have a working version…

  • http://circuitsoft.tumblr.com CircuitSoft

    THIS IS AWESOME.

    • http://twitter.com/ParkerReno Parker Ciambrone

      you just need to buy Windows Server… 

  • Richard Raseley

    This is really one of the most intriguing features of Windows 8 in my mind. I am curious to see what different disk aggregate types are going to be available and if we are going to end up with something like ZFS which gives you RAID comparable performance and redundancy with JBODs.