Windows 8 to get self-healing ‘Storage Spaces’

Microsoft will introduce in Windows 8 what it calls Storage Spaces – a method of putting drives into a virtual pool from which self-healing virtual disks can be created, with some resemblance to ZFS features.

Details of these virtual disks – the aforementioned Storage Spaces – were described in a 4,400-word deep-dive blog post on Thursday, introduced by Microsoft Windows Division head, Steven Sinofsky, and written by a member of Redmond's Storage and File System team, Rajeev Nagar.

Storage Spaces are being added to the coming Windows 8 Beta and can be tried out in the Windows 8 Developer Preview. The basic idea is to provide automated data protection and resiliency against physical drive failures, and a storage volume that is actually larger than individual physical drives.

A group of physical disk drives have their capacity aggregated into a single named storage pool. Once allocated to a pool, the individual physical drives are owned by Windows, and are not available or addressable by Windows 8 users as file/folder locations on individual drives. Read more...