Everybody on YouTube who has covered this topic about the Storage Pool seems to like it but I have a question none of them have covered does the Pool lose it’s ability to be accessed if it’s the hard drive with the operating system on it that fails. If so it seems like a useless tool to me and data would better be backed up somewhere else.
Storage pools on Windows are like a software raid.
If you set it up to just pool all the space together, you’re going to lose your data.
If you set it up to use parity (similar to raid5), you’re going to be fault tolerant against one disk failure.
I don’t use Windows often, so I don’t remember all the options, but basically, there are different options that allow different levels of fault tolerance.
No type of disk pooling, RAID or array is a substitute for a good, working, tested backup. Don’t underestimate the ability of your house to burn down, leaving you with no data.
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You make a good point, I lost everything to a house fire once already. I’m not really to concerned about backups but I was just asking the question, what will happen to the data on these drives if the operating system crashed. Could you just start with a fresh new OS and it could ready the data you had stored there?
Sorry to hear that. I live in a place where that happens to people regularly, so I’m a bit sensitive on that front.
Oh, I misunderstood the question. In regards to the OS crashing, I’m not 100% sure. I’d imagine you can probably import the pool into a new OS because it stores metadata about the pool on the drives themselves.
normally if you have a storage pool og some sorts.
You’d have a boot drive, and a pool of drive(s).
It’s not adviceable to have your storage pool also contain your OS due to wear and tear.
If said pool crashes, you would still want to be able to access it regardless wether it is windows,
ZFS, or MD(or what ever the raid array thingie is called in linux), heck even lvm pools.
You wanna seperate your OS, from the pool.
But it should be said, some “pools” are better at being recovered then others.
E.g. M$ software pools are gone the second your OS goes kaput(i barely trust MS to guard my installed games drive),
where as ZFS does stand a chance, since it is alot more intelligent, and resillient then NTFS, but by far not flawless.
but running Raid pools is what it is, you run a risk. And if things go awry, data gets lost fast.
Having had a decent amount of experience working with Storage Spaces (the name Microsoft uses for the tech), I can tell you that if your OS drive dies or gets corrupted, just plug all the disks that were in your pool into another windows box that is the same build or newer. It will detect the drives and rebuild the pool with your data intact. I’ve tested this on my personal storage pool with ReFS as well as test systems at work and it just works. Just set your tolerance level (Simple = RAID 0 / JBOD, Mirrored = RAID1 / 10 and Parity = RAID 5 / 6) and go from there. While comparing RAID to Storage Spaces isn’t the best way to think about it, it helps understand the basic redundancy concepts and drive requirements. While Microsoft isn’t the most popular around here (and for very good reasons), I still think Storage Spaces is a decent storage solution if you are already using Windows.
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That’s the answer I was looking for . Thank you for taking the time.