Deep Into Storage Space

At the edge of the final storage frontier, the universe’s greatest storage system is about to unfold

- Anthony Howes

We all know SSDs are coming to kill old spinning storage, but for many of us, a bank of HDDs still offers the capacity we need—8K footage, a mass of multi-megabyte photos, and who knows what other encyclopedic-level storage demands the discerning Maximum PC reader has?—without totally breaking the bank.

There’s no doubt SSDs are catching up with their clunky spinning brethren on capacities, but the cost of a 4TB cutting-edge SSD drive would buy you nearly 30TB of spinning storage. If only there were a way to combine the storage space of old spinning drives with super-fast solid storage…. Well, say hello to Microsoft Storage Spaces. A modern solution for an ancient problem: Where to store all your old junk without enraging the other half. Storage Spaces are the Microsoft implementation of what the rest of the computing world generally calls storage pools.

It’s an attempt to abstract away the messy workings of RAID, mirrors, and JBODs, and present to the user a simple unified pool of storage, with the option of adding caching drives, the ability to mix and match drives of varying capacities, the bonus of device redundancy, and an easy way to manage your spaces.

It seems like the perfect solution, so why isn’t everyone using storage spaces? Well, Microsoft being Microsoft, it went and had to try to hobble a useful system for standard Windows 10 users. So, we’re here not only to explain how to get the most from your storage spaces, but also put back the missing functionality, no matter what Microsoft might want. Let’s get exploring….