Windows 8.1 - ReFS support w/storage spaces?

[icanhazapple]

Hi there,

I was about to purchase a few extra drives for a Storage Spaces setup, using parity. Will Windows 8.1 include support for formatting non-boot drives to ReFS? I think I'll hold off on my mass file-migration until I learn this.

Also, were the data re-balancing issues solved in 8.1, or are they an inherent feature with how Microsoft has decided to architect Storage Spaces?

 

[devil22]

From what I've read, you can format only a storage space drive array with ReFS, a single lonely drive will not format to ReFS (someone said something about the recovery console would allow this though, after which 8.1 will read/write it.) I don't think the rebalancing has been addressed, MS' advice is to add drives in multiples of the original configuration, so if you have 3x1TB Parity, add 3x1TB more for 6x1TB total, but don't add say 2x1TB resulting in 5x1TB total. If you want to play around with it, you can make .VHD files and make them into Storage Space arrays, and test if it works as you expect (some people don't know/think of this.) My personal advice, is not to depend on Storage Space Parity (or any other RAID5) if your data is important, but rather to have two separate drives and backup with something like robocopy. Most likely it will work, but you will be sorry if it does not and you have no other backup.