Expert

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Storage Spaces is an advanced feature that protects your data by grouping drives

Expert

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1 Make sure all your drives are attached

To begin using Storage Spaces (not available in Windows RT), you first need to attach your drives. If you’re adding new internal drives, you need to open your computer and fit them. A quicker option is to attach external drives; for performance reasons, we recommend choosing USB 3.0, eSATA or Thunderbolt compatible drives.

Storage Spaces is an advanced feature that protects your data by grouping drives

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3 Select your drivesIf the User Account Control asks

you to confirm running Storage Spaces, select ‘Yes’. In the next screen, you’re shown the drives you’ve connected that are suitable for Storage Spaces. The hard drive with Windows 8 installed isn’t shown. Any files currently on the drives will be deleted, so choose carefully!

4 Check your drives and create a pool

To make sure there’s nothing important on the drives you select, click ‘View files’. Windows Explorer opens and you can check to see what files are on the drives. If there are any files you want to keep, make sure you move them to a safe location on a drive you’re not going to use for Storage Spaces. When you’re done, click ‘Create pool’.

2 Open Storage Spaces

Press the [Windows] key to bring up the Start screen if you’re not there already, then type disk. Click ‘Settings’ and then click on ‘Manage Storage Spaces’. You’ll now see the Storage Spaces window. You haven’t used it before, so there’s just one simple option: ‘Create a new pool and storage space’. Click it.

8 Maintain your Storage Space

You can keep an eye on the health of your Storage Space by opening the Storage Space window as in Step 1, or by going to ‘Control Panel > System and Security > Storage Spaces’. You can make sure the Storage Space is working as it should, change its settings and view the individual drives to make sure none of them have failed.

7 Explore your new Storage Space

When you’ve chosen your resiliency type, click ‘Create Storage Space’. When done, Windows Explorer opens the Space and it looks just like a single drive. If you navigate to ‘Computer’, you’ll see that the individual disks you selected aren’t shown any more – instead, a single Storage Space is displayed.

6 Select the resiliency

Resiliency determines how Storage Spaces distributes data. ‘Simple’ creates a Space and only one copy of your data, offering no protection. ‘Two-way mirror’ creates two copies, protecting data if one drive fails. ‘Three-way mirror’ is even better, though you need at least five drives. ‘Parity’ spreads data over a minimum of three drives.

5 Configure the Storage Space

In the next window you can configure the Storage Space. You can give it a name, assign a drive letter to it, choose its size and select the resiliency. To begin with, give it a name and drive letter that you’ll remember. We’ll then go into more detail about the resilience.

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