Windows 8 Storage Spaces

Having dealt with Drive extender and being thoroughly unimpressed with it I'm not excited.

There is no speed benefit, in fact there is a significant speed penalty as demegrator goes about its business for disc duplication and data leveling. I wasn't even able to stream a Blu-ray movie off of the server while demegrator was doing its business.

For larger arrays disc duplication means having a 100% backup on a second hard drive which is very inefficient for space.

In your example you wouldn't be able to specify what files are on the fast solid-state disk and what files are on one of the slow spindles.

No thank you we don't need to bring that back.
 
If I read Wikipedia correctly, you can end up with virtual hard drive space. (thin provisioning).
No thanks. I like to know where my data is at exactly.
 
This might very well be an interesting technology. I wouldn't dismiss it completely. Drive extender does kind of suck, but based on my experiences playing with ZFS it is clear to me that storage pools have all kinds of interesting potential.

Just as libraries were the huge feature that made Windows 7 interesting to me, the same might be said of these.
 
I read the MSDN blog and to me it looks like RAID on cocain. You have two-2TB drives that are presented to the operating system as 10TB. Because the physical drives are mirrored, once you load 2TB of files to your 10TB 'hard drive', it's full. This is even better than 'smoke-n-mirrors'...it's RAID on cocain.
 
My take was that you created a multi-terabyte pool, but the space available in that pool is the actual space available.
Simple example:
Create 10TB pool. Install 2x 1TB drives and assign them to the pool. OS reports 10TB volume with 2TB available space. You then add more 2x 2TB drives to the same pool, and the available space increases to 6TB. Make the pool large enough, and you (almost) never need to worry about re-arranging your directory structures/file locations.

Obviously it gets more complicated quickly with mirroring, double-redundant mirroring, and parity options.
 
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