✔️ How to use the Storage Spaces feature in Windows 11
– Reviews News
All storage devices tend to fail after years of constant wear and tear, whether it's a hard disk drive (HDD) or an SSD (solid state drive). Although replacing a broken drive is quite easy, a drive failure is still one of the worst things that can happen to your Windows 11 PC. You can lose all your essential data in a heartbeat.
Luckily, you can avoid such scenarios and protect your data from disk failure by using the Storage Spaces feature in Windows 11. And here's a guide that explains everything you need to know about using it on your PC.
What are Storage Spaces in Windows 11 and why should I create one?
Storage Spaces is a Windows built-in feature that allows you to create an array/group of two or more physical hard drives to create a larger virtual disk or storage pool that you can use to store and protect your data.
Virtual disks created with Storage Spaces may seem to work like standard hard drives, but the main reason why you should create Storage Spaces on your Windows 11 PC is its resilience and scalability.
- Resilience refers to Storage Space's ability to create one or more copies of data spanned across multiple disks, helping to protect your valuable data from disk failure.
- Scalability refers to the ability of a storage space to expand its combined storage space by adding new disks, which essentially allows you to expand the storage space of a virtual disk, which is difficult with physical disks.
How to Create a Storage Space in Windows 11
Creating a Storage Space might seem like a complicated process, but it's easy to do in Windows 11. Unlike previous versions of Windows that relied on the Control Panel, Windows 11 makes it much easier to create Spaces storage through its new and improved Settings app. .
Here's how to easily create a storage space using the Settings app on your Windows 11 PC:
Step 1: Press Windows key + I to access the Settings app. Then click on Storage.
Step 2: On the Storage screen, click on the “Advanced storage settings” drop-down menu.
Step 3: In the “Advanced storage settings” drop-down menu, click on “Storage spaces”.
Step 4: Then click on “Create storage pool and storage space”.
5nd step : Type a name for the storage pool by clicking the text box under Name. Then select the drives you want to add to the pool.
Step 6: After naming the storage pool and selecting the appropriate disks, click Create.
Windows will then create a storage pool by merging several disks. In addition, Windows will ask you to create a storage space from it to activate the data protection mechanism.
7nd step : Type a name for the storage space by clicking the text box under Name. Then type a number to determine the size of the storage space you will create.
Step 8: Select your resiliency type or data protection method by clicking the "Two-Way Mirror" drop-down menu. Here's what each option does:
- Selecting Simple allows you to merge two disks without any data protection.
- Selecting bidirectional mirroring creates a single mirrored copy of your data and allows you to merge two disks with data protection in the event of a single disk failure.
- The Triple Mirroring selection creates two mirrored copies of your data and lets you merge five drives with data protection for up to two drive failures.
- Selecting Parity allows you to store files on three drives with parity information. Windows can use parity information to reconstruct data in the event of a single disk failure.
- Dual parity selection allows files to be stored on seven disks with parity information. Windows can use parity information to reconstruct data if two drives fail.
Then click Create to save your changes and create a new storage space.
Step 9: Type a name for the new volume by clicking in the text box under Label. Then click on the Drive Letter drop-down menu to assign a new drive letter to the new volume.
10nd step : Click the file system drop-down menu to select a file system for the new volume. Then click Format.
- Select NTFS (New Technology File System) if you plan to use the storage space to store data with standard protection against data corruption.
- Select ReFS (Resilient File System) if you plan to use the storage space to store a large amount of data with enhanced data protection against data corruption.
After clicking Format, a new disk partition with drive letter D should appear in File Explorer. Meanwhile, if a disk fails or you want to expand your storage space by adding a new hard disk, you can easily click the Physical disks drop-down menu and click the "Add disks to storage pool" button. .
Protect your data against sudden disk failures
The solutions mentioned above will help you store all your files on the newly created storage space. It's quite similar to getting another physical disk, except you can organize the storage space more efficiently. In the meantime, your Windows 11 PC should be ready to protect your valuable data from sudden disk failure.
SOURCE: Reviews News
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