Windows 8 Tip of the Day, Storage Spaces Explained

From Robert Mitchell!

Storage Spaces is functionality built into Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 that allows you to pool together physical disks into a logical grouping and then carve out virtual disks (aka storage spaces or just spaces).  These spaces can utilize different RAID levels and even thin provisioning.

Today’s tip explains what happens in Disk Management and Device Manager when you step through the process.

So first we have some disks.  I added 4 small disks just so I could get the screen shots…

If you were to look in Device Manager, you could see the disks there as well.  They are listed here as Virtual HDs because I did this in a virtual environment.  You wouldn’t do that normally.

When the pool is created all 4 disks will disappear from Disk Manager, but will still be visible in Device Manager.  Then when you carve out a storage space, that space will appear both in Disk Management (shown here as Disk 8) and in Device Manager (shown here as ‘Microsoft Storage Space Device).

Then you can format it with whatever file system is supported by the your Windows installation and use it as a regular disk.  But it is a bit disconcerting that your disks in Disk Management will appear to skip some numbers.  In my case, they show up as disk 0, 1, 2, 3, 8….since disks 4 -7 are now masked away from me.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Um, weird.  I get the same in IE right now.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  I'm trying to find the graphics files used to repost this sorry.

• Anonymous
  June 03, 2013
  I always seem to have problems with images from this site...they're never there...any reason?? thanks

• Anonymous
  June 03, 2013
  I get an authentication request when I view via Chrome if this helps?

• Anonymous
  June 07, 2013
  Likewise - no images - using Chrome

• Anonymous
  July 09, 2013
  Same here. Thought the would have fixed it by now