Windows 8 will make better use of storage

SOFTWARE CHURN FACTORY Microsoft has revealed how it plans to improve storage performance in Windows 8.

The feature called Storage Spaces is described by the firm in a blog post, and will use physical storage in a much more virtual way by creating pools using USB, SATA, or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disks that can be expanded with the addition of more hardware. Although it is not designed to replace Windows Home Server Drive Extender technology wholesale, it does perform some of its main tasks and will fill a gap for users.

Virtual disks known here as spaces will have thin provisioning features that could turn 4TB of space into 10TB, as well as resiliency to failures of physical media, the firm explained. Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky, who told us yesterday about the reset and refresh options in Windows 8, introduces the features.

"With thin provisioning, you can augment physical capacity within the pool on an as-needed basis. As you copy more files and approach the limit of available physical capacity within the pool, Storage Spaces will pop up a notification telling you that you need to add more capacity," Microsoft writes.

"You can do so very simply by purchasing additional disks and adding them to your existing pool. Once we have added this physical capacity, we don't need to do anything more to consume it. We can simply keep copying files or other data to the space within the pool and this space will automatically grow to utilize all available capacity within the containing pool, subject to its maximum logical size of 10TB."

Adding a new disk looks to be an easy affair and a few short steps are mentioned in the post. Once a space has created you can use it like any other disk, for example by turning on Bitlocker for encryption. As new disks are added, USB sticks for example, Windows 8 automatically adds them to the storage space.

Resiliency should be improved in two ways, one by monitoring performance, and two, by sharing storage between two places. This means that if one should fail then a backup will already be in existence.

"Even if one of the two disks fails, Storage Spaces can continue to deliver your data because at least one copy exists on a non-failed physical disks," added the firm. When a pool disk fails, Storage Spaces identifies the impacted slabs for all spaces utilizing the failed disk, and reallocates them to any available hot-spare disk or to any other suitable disk within the pool." µ