Building a Windows 8 Home Server - Step by Step by Terry Walsh

Author:Terry Walsh [Walsh, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: How-to, Nonfiction, Window 8 Home Server, Coddington
Published: 2012-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

Storage Pools and Storage Spaces

Before we configure the storage on our Windows 8 home server, I need to outline a couple of concepts: Storage Pools and Storage Spaces. In the words of Sesame Street, they belong together, but they’re not the same.

A Storage Pool consists of two or more physical disks. Once that pool is created, the physical drives are dedicated for use in that pool - they can’t be directly used by the rest of Windows. So, think of your Storage Pool as a big blob of storage space - made up of a bunch of physical drives - but we can think of it as a blob.

Storage Spaces are user-configurable divisions of that blob of space. You could simply create a single Storage Space encompassing the entire pool (in fact, greater than the pool if you wanted to use thin provisioning) should you wish. Alternatively, you may wish to create multiple storage spaces for different types of content, which can be protected in different ways. One storage space for your Documents and a second for your Music, Video and Photos for example.

Drive Letters are allocated to Storage Spaces, not Storage Pools. So, in the latter example, your Documents storage space would be allocated the F: Drive letter (for example) and your Media storage space would get the G: letter. Why would we want to do this? As we’ll see, the different methods of protecting data in Storage Spaces (known as Resiliency in the Microsoft world) have different pros and cons when it comes to performance. We may wish to ensure that our Music and especially Video data streams as fast as possible across the network, without any performance lag through resiliency - so it makes sense to carve that out in a separate storage space, with one method of resiliency whilst using a second storage space with another type of resiliency for the remaining data (which doesn’t need super-fast transfer speeds).

There’s a few more things to tell you about Storage Spaces:

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