What is storage spaces, and what kind of drives can I use it with?

Storage spaces is a new software alternatives to multiple-drive arrays such as RAID (in all its flavors).

This feature allows you to take any empty drives you have and combine them into one single, multi-drive, spanning array with either mirrored, parity, or non-redundant functionality.

Think of it as either RAID 1,5 or JBOD but you can use drives of differing size, can expand the array as new drives are installed, and the entire array can be moved as one Into any windows 8/server2012 machine with no data loss.

I am currently working on creating a new 25tb+ storage array with this. It's a great new feature and blows intels software raid solutions out of the water.

For a quick and easy guide for setting up a storage space, and what all the options mean, use this guide.

Any storage volume that windows can normally assign a drive letter to is eligible to be included in a storage space. Bootable drives are out though

Apparently you need unused drives for this, or external ones. Creating storage pools deletes any content on the drive. Luckily this works with VHDs, and I'm using a pair to test this out.

To create a storage space you need 2,3 or 5 drives at a minimum - depending on how you set it up. You can use storage drives, VHDs or physical drives (but it dosen't seem to like drives that have linux partitions, which explains my initial issue), which will be wiped out to create a new volume. Select 'manage storage spaces' to create a new pool from the start screen

Kinda obvious what to pick.

You can select the drives you want here. Its very politely seperated my unformatted drives from my formatted ones.

Select the resiliency type - we have 'simple' which is basically jbod, one way mirror (which is effectively raid 1 and needs two drives), three way mirror (needs 5 drives, can survive the loss of 3 ) and parity (needs 3, is effectively raid 5).

And thats about it.