Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

• Delete: You can delete a storage space as well. This will remove the space only; the containing pool is retained along with any attached storage.

that this option will not appear when there is only one drive in a space.

• Remove (drive): If you have two or more disks being used for a storage space, you will see a Remove link next to each. If you click this, the drive is removed from the pool and the space, is formatted, and will reappear in File Explorer with a new drive letter. If you remove the last drive associated with a pool, that pool will be removed as well.

While a single-disk storage space has some value, the inability to add resiliency at a later date seriously hampers that kind of configuration. As far as we’re concerned, the real value of Storage Spaces begins when you have two or more disks you can use in a mirrored setup. This configuration will automatically replicate data between two disks, providing you with some measure of protection in the event of a hard disk failure.

Consider the screen shown in Figure 11-7. Here in the Storage Spaces interface, you can see that the PC has two additional 3 TB drives that it can use as the basis for a storage pool and one or more contained storage spaces.

To get started, select both of the disks and then click Create pool. As before, the storage pool is created and you are shown the screen in Figure 11-8, where you select options related to the first contained storage space. This time, you can select a two-way mirror for some hardware resiliency. In fact, that resiliency type is selected by default.

Figure 11-7:Two additional disks will open up additional configuration options.

Figure 11-8:Now you can choose a two-way mirror.

Note that by default, Storage Spaces selects 2.72 TB (or roughly 3 TB) for the maximum size of the space, even though the total pool capacity is twice that. That’s because that’s the natural size of the mirrored disks: the combined size halved, so that each bit of data will be equally replicated across both physical disks. You can of course increase the logical size now and add physical storage later if and when it’s needed. In fact, you can basically make it as big as you want. (You can also increase or otherwise change the space’s maximum size later if needed.)

Everything about the space is normal from an Explorer perspective. You can even protect it with BitLocker if you want.

Click the Create storage space button to initialize the space. A new Explorer window opens, too, displaying this new space. But as you can see from the Explorer view that opens, it appears as a normal 3 TB disk to the system, even though under the hood it is using about 6 TB of actual physical storage spread across two disks. Mirroring reduces the available storage, but offers better resiliency. That’s the trade-off.

Back in the Storage Spaces control panel, you can see that once again the new pool has been created, along with a single space. But this time the space includes two hard disks, as you can see when you expand the Physical drives view as shown in Figure 11-9.

Figure 11-9:A two-way mirrored space, as seen in Storage Spaces

Under the hood, of course, a mirrored storage space is far more powerful than a single drive. Anything stored within is being replicated across the two physical disks, automatically. You could add more spaces to the pool, rename the pool or its contained spaces, and perform other management tasks. In fact, if you return to the Storage Spaces control panel, you’ll see a number of details about the pool and space you’ve created.

Storage Spaces is a pretty amazing feature, and it’s not hard to imagine tying together multiple high-terabyte hard drives to create a single pool of redundant storage for a massive video collection, music library, or any other data. But such a configuration seems to require a desktop computer, and unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you know that most people are turning to laptops, tablets, and hybrid portable computers, not traditional desktop computers. Is Storage Spaces only a toy for that niche audience of power users that still use desktop PCs? Not quite.

First, it is worth noting that many users with big media collections may indeed want to invest in a desktop PC solely so they can use this feature and then share their media around the home using the home network. In this way, a fairly pedestrian Windows 8 PC—albeit one with a ton of storage—could be used as a replacement for a Windows Home Server machine or, more likely, network attached storage. It’s just so versatile.

In fact, all of the Storage Spaces examples used in this chapter were done on a Windows 8-based tablet computer connected to a dock that had several USB 3.0-based hard drives chained to it through a USB 3.0-based extender.

But even for users of portable PCs and devices, Storage Spaces can make plenty of sense. Remember, this feature works equally well with internal and external storage, so there’s no reason you couldn’t link multiple external drives off your portable PC—or better yet, off a dock or USB port extender—and simply use the contained spaces when you’re sitting at the desk. When you’re out and about with the PC, it will still work normally. But when you’re home, or at the office, the space(s) will be available.

OK, but what happens when you start removing disks? Does Storage Spaces freak out? It depends.

If you detach all of the storage used by a space at once, the space will simply disappear. But when you reattach the storage, the space comes back immediately and all is well.

A more slippery slope is encountered when you remove one of the disks being used by a space that is configured with two or more disks. In this case, the space still exists in Explorer and functions normally. You can read and write to it and access it like any other disk. But under the hood, some error messages are being generated, and if you look at the Storage Spaces control panel, you’ll see the beginnings of a hissy fit developing, as in Figure 11-10. Spaces has detected that a drive is missing and, thus, the space’s resiliency is compromised.

Eventually, you’ll receive an Action Center-based notification warning you to reconnect the drive. But the system will continue working properly and, if you do reconnect the drive, all will return to normal. (This happens almost immediately, though Spaces will repair things, meaning it will ensure that the replication between drives is accurate and complete.)

But here’s where things get really weird.

Figure 11-10:A drive is missing from a mirrored space.

What happens when you use the drive or drives from a space with another Windows 8-based computer? That is, you bring home a different laptop from work, or whatever, plug in the drives that make up a space on some other machine. What then?

Amazingly, incredibly… it just works. Windows 8 will take a moment to install the devices the first time, but after a few seconds, you can open Explorer and see not the separate drives, but rather the exact same storage space, just as you had configured it on the original PC. (With one difference: It won’t necessarily retain the same drive letter between PCs.)