How To NEVER LOSE DATA Again, Use Windows Storage Space

How To NEVER LOSE DATA Again, Use Windows Storage Space to group multiple disks together and present them to Windows as one highly available disk

Managing multiple physical disks attached directly to a computer can often be a tedious task for administrators.
To overcome this problem, many organizations use SANs that group physical disks together.
SANs require specialized configuration and sometimes specialized hardware, which makes them expensive.
To overcome these issues, you can use the Storage Spaces feature.
Storage Spaces is a technology in Windows that can help protect your data from drive failures.
It pools disks together, and presents them to the operating system as a single disk.
Storage Spaces is a storage virtualization technology.
It is available in both windows Client and Windows Server.
Storage Space in Windows Server Datacenter edition is called Storage Space Direct.
Storage Space is conceptually similar to RAID, but it is implemented in software.
You can use Storage Spaces to group three or more drives together into a storage pool and then use capacity from that pool to create Storage Spaces.
You will then present those storage spaces to Operating System as individual highly available independent disks.
The primary advantage of Storage Spaces is that you do not have to manage single disks, and you can manage multiple disks as one unit.

Storage Layout:

Simple:
A simple space has data striping but it does not offer any redundancy.
Sequential data is segmented across all disks.
Striping makes it possible to access multiple segments of data concurrently.
Do not host important data on a simple volume

Two and Three-Way mirrors:
Mirror spaces maintain two or three copies of the data that they host.
Data duplication happens with every write to ensure that all data copies are always current.
Mirror spaces also stripe the data across multiple physical drives.
Mirror spaces provide the benefit of greater data throughput and lower access latency.

Parity:
A parity space is similar to RAID 5.
Storage Spaces stores data, along with parity information, striped across multiple physical drives.
Parity enables Storage Spaces to continue servicing read and write requests even when a drive has failed.
Parity always rotates across available disks to enable I/O optimization.
You will need a minimum of three physical drives for parity spaces.

⌚ Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:37 Concepts
4:32 Create Pool
6:04 Rename Pool
6:46 Create Storage Space
10:03 Add Disks to the Pool
10:24 Resize your Storage Space
10:58 Disk Management Console
11:49 Remove Disks from Pool

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[VarshithBR]

Amazing session, was in your lecture today !!

[vasiovasio]

This functionality is similar to TrueNAS and Unraid from the Linux world, but for Windows, and again it is a 100% software solution without needing to purchase any RAID Hardware.
Great Video! Thank you, Ali! :)

[robslatter]

Always appreciate your knowledge and tips 👍

[doughnut]

I have 2 NVMe SSDs on my Windows 10 machine that will also use 2ea 10TB RAID1 drives. How can I use one of these NVMe's as a cache drive for Storage Spaces?

[snakeatr]

Here is my situation: I currently have two mirrored drives (no storage pool) each three terabytes, and I want to get a third 3 tb drive and set up those with parity to get a total of 6 tb usable storage. But I don't have a place to copy all my data and then restore it to the parity Storage Space.
So I'm thinking if I break the mirror, then create a pool from two of the drives and create a striped storage space to get about 2.5 tb to copy all my data (risky i know), then format the first drive holding my data and add it to the pool and then create a Parity Storage Space with the leftover space from the stripe, this should give me about 3 TB of usable space on this new parity drive, copy all my data from the stripe, then remove the stripe and increase the size of the parity drive. Will this work?

[ekeithwilkinson]

Hi Ali. I have an issue with Storage Space and trying to get an answer with difficulty. I have 2 drives mirrored creating a storage pool on a Win 10 PC. I now want to remove these disks and put them into my new PC. However I do not see the option to Prepare For Removal for either disk and am unsure if can just disconnect and reconnect the disks into the new PC without any data loss. I know can backup to external drive and then delete the pool which i understand removes the data from both SATA disks but would prefer if possible to just unplug and recreate the pool in new Win 11 PC. Can you or subscribers advise regarding same please ? Thanks.

[wingmantuc]

I just updated to Windows 11 and Storage spaces just stop working. I used ReFs 3 disks in parity configuration.

[DARBADARBZ]

I do not have remove physical disk option in a storage pool, ideas?

[StenIsaksson]

You use VMware and virtual drives.
I tried to create a storage pool with only SSD's and get an error when trying to create it.
It can't create pools with only SSD's. It works with mechanical drives, but not with SSD's
It works if you have mechanical drives and add the SSD as a cache drive.

[mdd]

tired of playing with a pair of measly 1 TB drives in a Storage Spaces Mirror; I trust the process now, and have a pair of 12 TB WD Red Plus drives inbound, which should meet all my storage needs for at least 5-6 years, based on past usage patterns...

[OLDUSAFMedic]

I need to find a way for YouTube to display only videos that are less than 6 months old. This problem with outdated videos wastes time and never works because they change Windows so often that only recent videos have instructions you can follow.

[jimpaul]

Storage space is a software RAID and it works well as a RAID, weather it be RAID 0, 1, 5 etc. Just remember RAID is not a backup. I am running 5 SSDs in raid 5 now with Storage Space, but I also back it up. To ensure you don't loose data use the 3 2 1 strategy. 3 copies of your data on at least 2 different media types and 1 stored off site.

[rager-]

Many RAID controllers can support more than four drives.

[rockymarquiss]

Striping on mirror makes no sense - a mirror is an exact copy. It give the performance boost as the system can choose any of the three drives to get the data. In the case of a failure you have 1 (or 2) copies of the data. I guess I don't understand the comment that the data is striped in the mirrors - unless of course Microsoft doesn't use standard definition of mirror - which knowing Microsoft wouldn't be totally suprising.

[Kapsomounis]

Yeah it's good when it works, but good luck trying to recover data when it eventually fails or is non recognisable...