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The technology that we loved in Windows Home Server was Drive Pooling where you could add drives to the server and it would pool them together as one pool of storage. As most of you will know Microsoft removed Drive Extender from the final version of 2nd generation of Windows Home Server, basically Microsoft removed it because they couldn’t get it working correctly.

Surprisingly this technology is returning to Windows Server, mswhs.com reports that the technology called Storage Spaces enables pooling of disks so that they can be using on the server without the need for additional storage management. Whether this would make its way down to a consumer server product remains to be seen, I am not even sure there will be another Home Server product from Microsoft.

virtualizationreview.com describe the new feature as:

A new Windows Server 8 capability highlighted on Wednesday is “storage spaces,” which will let users take just-a-bunch-of-disks (JBOD) collections and carve out a space or pool that shows up as drive using the new Server Manager. Users can use this feature to simply attach JBODs to Windows Server 8, explained Brian Surace, a senior program manager on the Windows team. No external storage array was used to create the pool. The improved Server Message Block 2.1 (SMB 2.1) protocol was used to help make this pooled storage available, he said.

via mswhs.com

 

2 thoughts on “Drive pooling returns in Windows Server 8”
  1. Looks like my next home server will be a Windows 8 Server then! You’d expect this new Storage Spaces to filter in to the SBS range and maybe even the next WHS if there is going to be one?

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