Storage Spaces is a built-in storage virtualization technology in Windows Server that allows administrators to combine multiple physical hard drives into a single logical “storage pool”. From this pool, you can create virtual disks—known as Storage Spaces—and configure them with specialized resiliency and performance traits. This software-defined approach provides a cost-effective, flexible alternative to traditional hardware RAID controllers. Key Concepts & Workflow
Storage Spaces relies on a clear three-tier architecture to abstract physical hardware into highly available virtual drives:
Physical Disks: Standard SATA, SAS, or NVMe drives attached to a single server or an external JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) enclosure.
Storage Pools: A logical aggregation of the physical disks. You can create a pool by grouping unformatted physical drives together, allowing you to scale capacity easily by adding more drives later.
Storage Spaces (Virtual Disks): Virtual drives carved out of the storage pool’s total capacity. Windows handles these exactly like standard physical disks, allowing you to format them with file systems like NTFS or ReFS. Resiliency Methods
To protect against data loss from physical drive failures, Storage Spaces offers three distinct resiliency types, functionally similar to traditional RAID levels: Storage Spaces overview in Windows Server – Microsoft Learn
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