If you’ve built up a large amount of data on your computer, you may not always have enough space to store everything. Sometimes you’ll need additional storage to hold the larger files or فضای ذخیره ابری, but even those fill up fast.
With Windows 10 Storage Spaces, you can organize and consolidate all your files using a software-configured, RAID-like technology.
We’ll walk you through how to use the Storage Spaces feature on Windows 10 to create data backups.
What is Storage Spaces on Windows 10?
The Windows 10 Storage Spaces feature helps increase the amount of storage on your PC while protecting your data and storage from drive read errors or driver failures.
The feature is implemented in software similar to RAID, and can be used to group hard drives together into one virtual drive. It can also mirror data over several drives for redundancy.
From this pool, you can create Storage Spaces, which store extra copies of your data. This way, if one drive fails, you don’t lose all your data but still have intact copies available.
Plus, you can add more drives to the storage pool in case you run low on capacity in the pool of drives.
How Storage Spaces on Windows 10 Works
The Storage Spaces feature helps you combine multiple hard drives with duplicate mirrors of files into a single storage pool instead of spreading all your files across multiple drives. This way, you have one unified volume and add redundancy. If one drive fails, you can add another one and rebuild the storage without any از دست رفتن داده ها.
Storage Spaces works like RAID, except you don’t need another hardware RAID card because it’s performed entirely via software. It won’t perform as fast as a RAID card, but it’s easier and cheaper to implement if you’re using it for the first time.
Plus, Windows sees your Storage Spaces as any other hard drive – a unified volume with one drive letter and folders that work similar to any other folders. This means you can add your folders to libraries or share them with others on your network.
How to Create a Storage Space in Windows 10
To create a Storage Space in Windows 10, start by connecting the storage drives to your computer.
- بعد، تایپ کنید فضاهای ذخیره سازی را در جعبه جستجو جستجو کرده و انتخاب کنید فضاهای ذخیره سازی را مدیریت کنید از نتایج جستجو
- انتخاب کنید یک استخر و فضای ذخیره سازی جدید ایجاد کنید.
توجه داشته باشید: You can use an internal or دیسک سخت خارجی یا یک درایو حالت جامد (SSD) to create Storage Spaces in addition to the drive where Windows 10 is installed. Other drive formats you can use include یو اس بی, ATA, SATA, and SAS drives. However, you can’t use a کارت حافظه microSD to create Storage Spaces.
- بعد، انتخاب کنید درایو you want to add, and then select استخر ایجاد کنید.
- نام the drive(s) and اختصاص دادن الف نامه.
- انتخاب یک resiliency type. You can pick from three different layouts: Simple, Mirror, or Parity.
- La Simple spaces layout requires at least two drives and are designed for increased performance. Simple spaces are ideal for temporary data so they’re not recommended for protecting your data از جانب driver error or failure.
- Mirror spaces layout is also designed for storing a wide range of data and for increased performance. Unlike Simple spaces, you can use Mirror spaces to protect your data from drive failure. This layout holds multiple copies of your data and is classified into دو طرفه or سه راه mirror spaces.
دو طرفه makes two copies of your data, requires at least two drives to function, and can handle a single drive failure, while three-way makes three copies of your data, requires at least five drives to function, and can handle two drive failures.
- Unlike simple and mirror spaces, which are designed for increased performance, the Parity spaces are designed for storage efficiency. Not only that, but parity spaces keep multiple copies of your data and protect the data from driver failure. Plus, it works best for media files and archival data, and needs three or more drives to protect you from single drive failure and seven or more to protect from two drive failures.
توجه داشته باشید: Once you set the resiliency or file system, you can’t change it. You can rename a pool or space, add more drives and upgrade the storage space on-demand. Plus, for your drive to be available in Storage Spaces, it has to be around 5GB of size.
- انتخاب کنید فضای ذخیره سازی ایجاد کنید.
توجه داشته باشید: Whenever you add new drives to a Storage Spaces pool, optimize the drive usage to move some of the data to the new drive. This way, you’ll make optimum use of the pool’s overall storage capacity. If you add a drive before upgrading a pool, you’ll need to optimize your drive usage به صورت دستی
How to Add a Drive to Storage Spaces
Now that you have your Storage Spaces, you can use your PC normally. However, if you run low on space again, you can easily add more storage to the storage pool.
- برای انجام این کار، به فضاهای ذخیره سازی را مدیریت کنید صفحه را انتخاب کرده و انتخاب کنید تغییر تنظیمات.
- را انتخاب کنید درایوها را اضافه کنید button next to your current storage pool.
- Backup your drive and then select it, otherwise it’ll be erased and you’d lose data. Check the Optimize Drive Usage box so that some data moves to the new drive.
- انتخاب کنید درایوها را اضافه کنید.
Windows will finish moving your data and you’ll have a much larger pool of drives.
How to Disconnect a Drive From a Storage Space
Once you configure a Storage Space, you can remove a drive that’s in use from a pool. If you just yank the drive out, you could lose your data and cause other issues, but there are steps to do this by moving the data on the drive to other drives in the storage pool and then removing the drive from your PC.
- To disconnect a drive from a pool, open فضاهای ذخیره سازی را انتخاب کنید و Physical drives to expand the section. Select Prepare for removal.
- Find the drive you want to remove and select برداشتن.
- بعد، انتخاب کنید Remove drive to complete the removal process.
توجه داشته باشید: Once you disconnect the drive, you won’t be able to access it in File Explorer. To do so, you’ll need to right-click Start > Disk Management and find the drive labelled تخصیص نیافته. Right-click the drive, select جلد ساده جدید and follow the steps to reformat the drive in the Disk Management utility.
How to Delete a Windows 10 Storage Space or Storage Pool
If you don’t need the storage space anymore, you can delete it using these steps.
- باز کن فضاهای ذخیره سازی, find the space you don’t need and select حذف. If you hadn’t made a backup of the data in that space, you’ll lose it all since deleting a space permanently deletes all the data it contains.
- بعد، انتخاب کنید Delete storage space.
- To delete a storage pool, open فضاهای ذخیره سازی, find the pool you want to remove and select Delete pool.
- انتخاب کنید Delete pool to complete the deletion process.
توجه داشته باشید: You can’t delete a pool that contains a storage space. To do this, remove all the storage spaces within the pool first, and then delete the pool. Once you delete a storage pool, the drive in use will be restored to your PC, and you can reformat it via Disk Management.
Add More Storage to Your PC
Creating and using Storage Spaces in Windows 10 may seem a bit confusing, but with the steps above, you should be able to do it by yourself.
Share with us your experience creating and using Windows 10 Storage Spaces by leaving a comment below.