14 DAY TRIAL // When released, Windows 8 is expected to offer increased reliability when user's data is involved, while also ensuring that data is kept safe. For that, Microsoft included a new feature in the operating system, called Storage Spaces, and meant at ensuring that data remains protected even when hardware fails.
With this new capability, users can keep their physical disks organized into storage pools. New disks can be easily added into the mix.
In a recent blog post, Rajeev Nagar, group program manager on Microsoft's Storage and File System team, explains that disks can be connected using USB, SATA (Serial ATA), or SAS (Serial Attached SCSI).
Moreover, he notes that a storage pool can include heterogeneous physical disks. This means that there can be different sized physical disks, which can be accessed using various storage interconnects.
Any physical disk added to the pool will no longer be accessible directly by the rest of Windows. Thus, they can offer increased reliability.
Through Storage Spaces, users will also be able to take advantage of virtual disks (also known as spaces). These virtual disks behave in the same manner as physical disks do, but there's more to it.
Rajeev Nagar explains that “spaces also have powerful new capabilities associated with them such as thin provisioning [...], as well as resiliency to failures of underlying physical media.”
He also notes that the new feature will come as a replacement of the Windows Home Server Drive Extender technology, which was deprecated.
However, it will bring along a variety of other features, in addition to packing some of the core requirements of the older technology.
“It is also a fundamental enhancement to the Windows storage platform, which starts with NTFS,” Rajeev Nagar continues.
“Storage Spaces delivers on diverse requirements that can span deployments ranging from a single PC in the home, up to a very large-scale enterprise datacenter.”
There will also be a series of other Windows technologies included in the next platform release, aimed at leveraging the capabilities that Storage Spaces will arrive with.
Storage Spaces will become available for everybody in the Beta release of Windows 8, which is slated to arrive in late February. Some related features have been included in the Windows 8 Developer Preview as well.
Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 M3 can be found on Softpedia via this link.
