The VAR Guy

More than a year ago users lamented at the loss of the Windows Home Server Drive Extender feature, which allowed users to continually add drives to a singular storage pool to virtually create one giant drive. Now, Windows 8 is bringing it back with a vengeance. Dubbed Storage Spaces, the new feature in Windows 8 will give everybody room to grow …

The Building Windows 8 blog has a huge article on how Storage Spaces will work, but I’ll cut through the mumbo-jumbo for you: Storage Spaces is an extension of what Drive Extender was. It provides the ability to add disks, of any kind (USB, SATA, IDE, eSATA, etc.), into one single storage pool, and then create one large virtual disk that leverages backup and recovery technology to make the best of a user’s physical storage pool.

Users can create one virtual storage space or multiple spaces and Windows will smartly virtualize and expand, all the way up to 10TB. In fact, Windows will always show this drive as 10TB, but let users know when they need to add more storage to their physical data pool. Best of all, Windows 8 has resiliency built in, meaning all storage pool data is copied twice on two different physical disks (a lot like Drobo, or similar storage technologies). So if a user loses one disk to drive failure — or a curious pet chewing through wires — it’s okay — they can just get a new drive and plug it in.

As an owner of a few 500GB drives of various types, I would love to pool them together and build a cheap Windows 8 file server. More importantly, this feature means Windows 8 has the ability to provide small-business users with a much more efficient and resourceful way of building out file-sharing technology at the office. No mess with RAID, no issue with compatibility, no problems with data-striping. Windows 8 is shaping up to be an operating system of sweet and simple solutions.

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