Microsoft has posted to its Building Windows 8 blog details on the next-gen platform new Storage Spaces feature. Storage Spaces continues the Drive Extender concept from Windows Home Server, allowing the system to pool physical hard drives of various sizes and interfaces to redundantly store data for scale, resiliency, and efficiency.

The system works like a RAID setup but the physical hard drives are grouped into a larger storage pool, which is then split up into spaces. The disks in a pool can be of mismatched sizes and of different interface technologies, such as USB, SATA, and Serial Attached SCSI. New disks can be added anytime while others can be connected but kept on standby only to turn on when needed.

The spaces are virtual disks that function like the physical disks but has more powerful capabilities to ensure redundancy. At least two copies of all data within a space are stored on at least two different physical drives.