Building Windows 8 Blog details Windows 8 storage features

Remember Drive Extender in Windows Home Server v1? Well its sort of back in Windows 8, Microsoft have talked about the new drive technology in in the new OS. Windows 8 introduces Storage Spaces that enables pooling of disk and the use of virtual disks. It does sound like Drive Extender but Microsoft say “Storage Spaces is not intended to be a feature-by-feature replacement for that specialized solution, but it does deliver on many of its core requirements”

The features will be in the beta due in February and looks like it could be pretty powerful

Read more on Microsoft’s blog

In this post, we are going to dive into a feature in the Windows 8 Developer Preview. Storage Spaces are going to dramatically improve how you manage large volumes of storage at home (and work). We’ve all tried the gamut of storage solutions—from JBOD arrays, to RAID boxes, or NAS boxes. Many of us have been using Windows Home Server Drive Extender and have been hoping for an approach architected more closely as part of NTFS and integrated with Windows more directly. In building the Windows 8 storage improvements, we set out to do just that and developed Storage Spaces. Of course, the existing solutions you already use will continue to work fine in Windows 8, but we think you will appreciate this new feature and the flexible architecture. As we talk all about consumer electronics next week, thinking about all the media we all have in photos (especially huge digital negatives) and videos, this feature is sure to come in handy. In this post, Rajeev Nagar, a group program manager on our Storage and File System team, details this new feature