Storage Spaces is Windows’ built-in software-defined storage feature — pooling multiple physical disks into a flexible virtual storage layer with configurable resiliency, roughly analogous to what LVM and RAID do together on Linux.
# Create a storage pool from available physical disks $disks = Get-PhysicalDisk -CanPool $true New-StoragePool -FriendlyName "DataPool" -StorageSubsystemFriendlyName "Windows Storage*" -PhysicalDisks $disks # Create a resilient virtual disk within the pool New-VirtualDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName "DataPool" -FriendlyName "DataDisk" ` -ResiliencySettingName Mirror -Size 500GB # Initialize, partition, and format it like any normal disk Get-VirtualDisk "DataDisk" | Get-Disk | Initialize-Disk -PartitionStyle GPT -PassThru | New-Partition -AssignDriveLetter -UseMaximumSize | Format-Volume -FileSystem ReFS
Resiliency Options
- Simple — no redundancy, maximum capacity (like RAID 0)
- Mirror — data duplicated across disks (like RAID 1/10)
- Parity — space-efficient redundancy with a performance cost (like RAID 5)
Storage Spaces paired with ReFS unlocks automatic bit-rot detection and repair from redundant copies — the same self-healing concept ZFS offers on Linux, achieved through a completely different but genuinely comparable mechanism.