Windows 8 Storage Spaces
One of the features I'm really excited for in Windows 8 is Storage Spaces. I keep backups of my data at the moment, but I tend to be very wary and have my backups, typically, in numerous places. In some cases (namely older, more important files to me) I may actually have more copies than I have physical disks as I have backed up my back ups and now I have some stuff backed up within other back ups.
I don't I have personally had any drives fail on me unexpectedly. But I have certainly seen enough of it to know that I just don't trust hard drives.
So, as one might expect, I was thrilled then with the mention of Storage Spaces in Windows 8. Almost all of my backed up data is already in one single back-up location in addition to its original location. Which is a 320GB hard drive I ripped out of my current laptop when I upgraded to a 7200 RPM drive. But, I haven't been able to part with the original copies fearing one drive or the other might die.
On a parallel story, I've been extremely excited about TFS Express. But I haven't been willing to dive in and start associating all of my projects with a TFS instance sitting on a ticking time bomb of a hard drive.
And on a third, parallel story. I haven't been able to justify a solid state drive because getting one large enough to store my original data, the OS, and everything else I put on my computers on a regular basis was just too expensive.
So, we hit the obvious convergence. I already have a bunch of SATA and IDE drives of varying formats and sizes. Storage Spaces doesn't care, it will use any I want it to use. Thin provisioning means I can specify a size larger than the physical disk(s) and grow it as I reach the physical limitations. Mirroring means that my data can be automatically replicated, and when a disk dies I can simply add a new disk to the pool to hold the lost copy of data. And all of this means I can finally move all of my data into one central file server. It means I will have a suitably reliable place to store my TFS database, and it means that once the originals are off of my existing drives that I can start buying smaller SSD's which also frees up my current drives as additional storage space and back up drives.
I'm also a bit of an OS whore. But I have slowed down this trend recently because trying to preserve all of my data gets hard when you have multiple computers, each with a different subset of your personal data. With all of my data stored in a mirrored storage space however I'll finally be able to reformat without worrying what I lost this time around.
So, I've ordered an extra USB Hard Drive enclosure. Will be dumping my second good external into it and starting my new Storage Pool. If all goes according to plan, I will replace my XPS's 2 RAID 0 drives with a single, smaller (probably 32 - 64) GB SSD and using the 2 drives that were in there and a few more external enclosures for a new storage pool, I will have one for my use and a generic one for household storage. Both with mirroring. Eventually I will buy another SSD for my everyday laptop and have the drive in that one as a backup.
And the moral of the story is... even if you find you don't like Windows 8 in general. Any household with multiple PC's and a lot of files they want to keep safe would be stupid not to get at least one desktop with Windows 8 on it and a few external (or even internal) HD's and use it as a file server for all of the other PC's in the house.
I don't I have personally had any drives fail on me unexpectedly. But I have certainly seen enough of it to know that I just don't trust hard drives.
So, as one might expect, I was thrilled then with the mention of Storage Spaces in Windows 8. Almost all of my backed up data is already in one single back-up location in addition to its original location. Which is a 320GB hard drive I ripped out of my current laptop when I upgraded to a 7200 RPM drive. But, I haven't been able to part with the original copies fearing one drive or the other might die.
On a parallel story, I've been extremely excited about TFS Express. But I haven't been willing to dive in and start associating all of my projects with a TFS instance sitting on a ticking time bomb of a hard drive.
And on a third, parallel story. I haven't been able to justify a solid state drive because getting one large enough to store my original data, the OS, and everything else I put on my computers on a regular basis was just too expensive.
So, we hit the obvious convergence. I already have a bunch of SATA and IDE drives of varying formats and sizes. Storage Spaces doesn't care, it will use any I want it to use. Thin provisioning means I can specify a size larger than the physical disk(s) and grow it as I reach the physical limitations. Mirroring means that my data can be automatically replicated, and when a disk dies I can simply add a new disk to the pool to hold the lost copy of data. And all of this means I can finally move all of my data into one central file server. It means I will have a suitably reliable place to store my TFS database, and it means that once the originals are off of my existing drives that I can start buying smaller SSD's which also frees up my current drives as additional storage space and back up drives.
I'm also a bit of an OS whore. But I have slowed down this trend recently because trying to preserve all of my data gets hard when you have multiple computers, each with a different subset of your personal data. With all of my data stored in a mirrored storage space however I'll finally be able to reformat without worrying what I lost this time around.
So, I've ordered an extra USB Hard Drive enclosure. Will be dumping my second good external into it and starting my new Storage Pool. If all goes according to plan, I will replace my XPS's 2 RAID 0 drives with a single, smaller (probably 32 - 64) GB SSD and using the 2 drives that were in there and a few more external enclosures for a new storage pool, I will have one for my use and a generic one for household storage. Both with mirroring. Eventually I will buy another SSD for my everyday laptop and have the drive in that one as a backup.
And the moral of the story is... even if you find you don't like Windows 8 in general. Any household with multiple PC's and a lot of files they want to keep safe would be stupid not to get at least one desktop with Windows 8 on it and a few external (or even internal) HD's and use it as a file server for all of the other PC's in the house.
Comments
Post a Comment