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Storage pools and storage spaces in Windows

The Deep End

Article from ADMIN 26/2015

By Marc Grote

Storage spaces and storage pools combine a variety of storage technologies into a single logical unit, ensuring high availability and a choice of resiliency capability.

Microsoft introduced storage pools and storage spaces with Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. They help combine physical disks with different capacities and technologies, such as USB, SATA, and SAS to form logical units, known as storage spaces. You can then form storage pools with different resilience capabilities from these storage spaces.

For example, you could combine four USB drives, each with a capacity of 3TB, and two hard drives with SATA and SAS connections, each with a capacity of 1TB, to form a storage pool, thus achieving a gross storage capacity of 16TB. This storage can then be used to set up storage spaces with or without resilience capabilities. The maximum number of storage pools [1] on a system is unlimited; the maximum size of a storage pool is 4PB [2].

Storage spaces are virtual hard drives that are available to the system under a drive letter. These virtual hard drives are often referred to as LUNs (logical unit numbers), a name you often find for disks in storage area networks (SANs). When creating storage spaces, you can choose whether the failure of one or two disks will be tolerated, or whether the storage space will only be created in the form of a pool of disks without fault tolerance. This fail-safe measure is referred to as "resilience" and is largely equivalent to the well-known RAID levels.

Storage spaces can be created using a function called "thin provisioning," which makes more storage capacity than is actually present in the storage system available to the Windows system in conjunction with virtual hard drives. As soon as the capacity used by the PC exceeds a certain threshold, additional free space is made available from an existing storage pool. When creating a storage space, you can set the maximum storage capacity to 20TB, even if the connected disks only provide a gross capacity

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