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Storage Spaces

What are your thoughts on this?

It has a lot of potential, looks very well thought-out. It is a RAID system, despite MS claiming otherwise. RAID is not as safe in practice as it is deemed to be in theory. Assumptions made about the reliability of hard drives is the first flaw, and the fact that you can lose two or more drives at the same time also increases risk, so a backup should still be maintained -unwise of MS not to mention that.

Hopefully, the feature can be disabled. It seems rather silly to have half or more of your hard drive being eaten by a "virtual" back up drive. A "virtual" drive is worthless if the hard drive fails.

Doesn't matter to me since I won't be using Windows 8.

Hard drive backups are nice, but I still back up on optical media (CDs or DVDs). Every couple of years, I copy the discs to new discs.

IdeasVacuum wrote:It has a lot of potential, looks very well thought-out. It is a RAID system, despite MS claiming otherwise. RAID is not as safe in practice as it is deemed to be in theory. Assumptions made about the reliability of hard drives is the first flaw, and the fact that you can lose two or more drives at the same time also increases risk, so a backup should still be maintained -unwise of MS not to mention that.

In addition to the disadvantages of raid you listed, there is another that is very important. If you set up your hard drive raid on one motherboard, and it craps out, then you might not be able to retrieve the data... this happened to me last month. I had to seek out a discontinued motherboard to recover my data, because a new, modern mother board would not recognize the raid set up from my two-year old motherboard.

Tenaja wrote:In addition to the disadvantages of raid you listed, there is another that is very important. If you set up your hard drive raid on one motherboard, and it craps out, then you might not be able to retrieve the data... this happened to me last month. I had to seek out a discontinued motherboard to recover my data, because a new, modern mother board would not recognize the raid set up from my two-year old motherboard.

You will not have that problem with Win8 storage spaces. Just plug your 50TB storage space into another
Win8 device and use it.

The article says it all. You do not need to use the mirror mode. You can just add more
and more drives as you require more space and it will insert it into your pool.

But if you would like a little bit more security for the data you can choose between different modes:
mirror everything, so you always have 2 full copies distributed across different drives;
mirror it 2 times optionally, so you have always 3 complete copies of your data;
use parity/redundancy checks.

Of course you can still make complete backups of your 50TB data to DVD or Blueray if you like to do so. Have fun.

It is all optional, you are not forced to use this new feature.

To me it sounds good. We have to handle bigger and bigger data in the future.
More RAM, bigger disks, more and bigger data. But before i tried it i can't say more.