As much as we've been complaining about Windows 8, I've recently read about Windows 8 Storage Spaces when I was configuring a system for a friend of mine. His concern was the inability to backup the system as he saw it, and was of course concerned about losing everything! Well things turned out to be more secure, data-health wise than we thought.
There are two uses for Storage Spaces. The first option allows us to increase the size of a drive by spanning drives on the fly, literally. You need more space? Add an empty drive and grow your current one by spanning the drive. This is effectively using RAID 0 technology, so be aware of backups. In this same applet is the ability to create mirrors. A mirror is a duplicate of your current drive and can be called into action should you have a system failure. This works only for data and not the system at the present time, but that's not such a bad thing either.
The ability to increase space is something, I think, is useful for us and especially for those that have those small-sized SSDs. A small, very fast RAID 0 can be built very easily initially, and space can be added as needed. Combine this with a mirrored setup, and you have a fairly stable system. Just remember that a mirror requires twice the amount of space you have to use. So if you have 2TB for storage for example, and decide to mirror this, you will actually have to use 4TB in hard drives.
Using the Windows 7 Recovery found under File History, a full backup can be made of the boot drive and a recovery DVD made. Unlike the older versions of NT Backup, these backups can be written to another internal drive, USB drive, or even a network location. Using a combination of the boot/recover DVD and the backup data, the system can be restored easily.
John
There are two uses for Storage Spaces. The first option allows us to increase the size of a drive by spanning drives on the fly, literally. You need more space? Add an empty drive and grow your current one by spanning the drive. This is effectively using RAID 0 technology, so be aware of backups. In this same applet is the ability to create mirrors. A mirror is a duplicate of your current drive and can be called into action should you have a system failure. This works only for data and not the system at the present time, but that's not such a bad thing either.
The ability to increase space is something, I think, is useful for us and especially for those that have those small-sized SSDs. A small, very fast RAID 0 can be built very easily initially, and space can be added as needed. Combine this with a mirrored setup, and you have a fairly stable system. Just remember that a mirror requires twice the amount of space you have to use. So if you have 2TB for storage for example, and decide to mirror this, you will actually have to use 4TB in hard drives.
Using the Windows 7 Recovery found under File History, a full backup can be made of the boot drive and a recovery DVD made. Unlike the older versions of NT Backup, these backups can be written to another internal drive, USB drive, or even a network location. Using a combination of the boot/recover DVD and the backup data, the system can be restored easily.
John