Our PCs have become a treasure trove of precious files that we want to keep indefinitely or can’t afford to lose. But these files pile up over time, forcing us to install bigger or multiple drives to increase capacity. Managing files across several drives can be cumbersome, but luckily, Windows has a solution: Storage Spaces. Show
With Storage Spaces, not only can you consolidate all your files across multiple drives efficiently, but you can also add data resiliency. Here’s what you need to know about this useful Windows feature. What Is a Storage Space in Windows?A Storage Space combines multiple drives under a single unified space known as a pool. Once pooled together, you can create virtual drives from the available capacity. These virtual drives are the actual Storage Spaces, and you can use them to store your data. A good reason to create a Storage Space is to have all your drives in a single volume. So instead of having drives D and E exist separately, you can place them all under one drive letter F. That way, you don’t have to scratch your head wondering which drive you place that critical file since you’ll only have one place to look. Perhaps the biggest reason to create a Storage Space is data resiliency. When data is resilient, it means you can restore it from situations where you could have lost it completely. Usually, a Storage Space makes additional copies of your data and stores it on multiple drives, which comes in handy should one of the drives fail. It’s just one of the ways of creating a local backup when you don’t want to rely on cloud storage. Resilience Types for Storage Spaces When it comes to resilience, there are four types you can choose from, which are:
How to Create a Storage SpaceYou can use a combination of internal and external hard disk drives or solid-state drives to create a Storage Space. To do this, start by typing “storage space” in the Search box of the Taskbar. Next, click on Manage Storage Spaces and then Create a new pool and storage space.
Choose the drives you want to pool from the ones connected to your PC and click on create pool. Doing this will make windows format each selected drive. That means if there are files you wish to keep on any of them, make sure you’ve backed them up before proceeding.
To avoid running into errors while creating Storage Spaces, make sure no program is accessing the drives. Another good idea would be to preformat them to the right file system (NTFS) before beginning the process. Next, give the Storage Space a name, choose a drive letter and resilience type, and enter the size you want it to be. Click on Create storage space to finish setting it up.
Afterward, you should see the Storage Space show up as a drive when looking at Devices and drives under This PC. It will have the name and drive letter you assigned it. Adding a Drive to a Storage SpaceIf you’re someone who likes to keep large files on their computer, you can quickly run out of storage space. A remarkable feature of Storage Spaces is that it makes it easy to add another physical drive to the pool to extend its capacity. To begin, navigate to the Manage Storage Spaces window, click on Change Settings, and allow the app to make changes to your device. Then, click on Add drives.
In the next window, you’ll notice that the OS has checked the Optimize drive usage option by default. You can leave it as it is if you want Windows to distribute files across all drives to use the available space efficiently. However, this will make your PC slow. Finish the process by clicking Add drives.
Deleting a Storage SpaceIf you wish to use one of the physical drives for something else, you can simply remove it from the pool. Click Prepare for removal under Physical drives in the Manage Storage Spaces window.
Windows will start getting the drive ready for removal, and when the process is over, click Remove.
In the next window, click Remove drive, and you will no longer see the drive in the Storage Space. Now You’re Ready to Create Storage SpacesWhen you have more than one drive connected to your computer, Storage Spaces allow you to combine them effectively. Not only does this allow you to maximize your storage capacity, but it also protects single or multi-drive failure. As you can see, creating Storage Spaces and adding and removing drives isn’t all that hard. You can use this useful Windows feature to make the multi-drive system of your dreams. But for now, this article should serve as a good overview. Which disks and volumes can be used for storage spaces direct?Storage Spaces Direct works with direct-attached SATA, SAS, NVMe, or persistent memory (PMem) drives that are physically attached to just one server each.
What type of drives are used with Windows storage spaces?You need at least two extra drives (in addition to the drive where Windows is installed). These drives can be internal or external hard drives, or solid state drives. You can use a variety of types of drives with Storage Spaces, including USB, SATA, and SAS drives.
How many disks minimum are needed for mirror storage layout?The virtual disk uses three-way mirroring and is a fixed size of 20 GB. You must have at least five physical disks in the storage pool for this cmdlet to work.
How many physical disks are required to implement twoWith the Simple resiliency type, data is written across all the disks and you thus have no fault tolerance if a disk fails. At least one disk must be available in the storage pool. With two-way mirroring, the data is on at least two disks. This means the system is protected against data loss if a disk fails.
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