Our PCs have become a treasure trove of precious files that we want to keep indefinitely or can’t afford to lose. But these files pile up over time, forcing us to install bigger or multiple drives to increase capacity. Managing files across several drives can be cumbersome, but luckily, Windows has a solution: Storage Spaces.

With Storage Spaces, not only can you consolidate all your files across multiple drives efficiently, but you can also add data resiliency. Here’s what you need to know about this useful Windows feature.

What Is a Storage Space in Windows?

A Storage Space combines multiple drives under a single unified space known as a pool. Once pooled together, you can create virtual drives from the available capacity. These virtual drives are the actual Storage Spaces, and you can use them to store your data.

A good reason to create a Storage Space is to have all your drives in a single volume. So instead of having drives D and E exist separately, you can place them all under one drive letter F. That way, you don’t have to scratch your head wondering which drive you place that critical file since you’ll only have one place to look.

Related: Tips for Managing and Organizing Your Computer Files

Perhaps the biggest reason to create a Storage Space is data resiliency. When data is resilient, it means you can restore it from situations where you could have lost it completely. Usually, a Storage Space makes additional copies of your data and stores it on multiple drives, which comes in handy should one of the drives fail.

It’s just one of the ways of creating a local backup when you don’t want to rely on cloud storage.

Resilience Types for Storage Spaces

Three Samsung external hard drives

When it comes to resilience, there are four types you can choose from, which are:

  • Simple: This option has no resilience, meaning that your files only have a single copy stored in the drive. To create this type of Storage Space, you only need one drive. However, there will be no way to protect your data in the event of drive failure.
  • Two-way mirror: This resilience type creates an additional copy of every file placed in the Storage Space. This layout requires a minimum of two hard drives to work. So, if one fails, you can easily add another to the pool, and Windows create copies of your data again.
  • Three-way mirror: When you choose this type of resilience, even your copy will have a copy. That means, if one or two of the drives in the Storage Space fail, you’ll still have one more that you can use to restore the lost data. This setup requires a minimum of five drives to work.
  • Parity: With parity, you’ll have data stored in multiple drives, along with parity information. If one of the drives fails, Windows will use the information to rebuild any data you lost due to the failure. You’ll need a minimum of three drives for this to work.

Related: All the Different RAID Types Explained

How to Create a Storage Space

You can use a combination of internal and external hard disk drives or solid-state drives to create a Storage Space. To do this, start by typing “storage space” in the Search box of the Taskbar. Next, click on Manage Storage Spaces and then Create a new pool and storage space.

Creating a new pool and storage space

Choose the drives you want to pool from the ones connected to your PC and click on create pool. Doing this will make windows format each selected drive. That means if there are files you wish to keep on any of them, make sure you’ve backed them up before proceeding.

Selecting a drive for storage space

To avoid running into errors while creating Storage Spaces, make sure no program is accessing the drives. Another good idea would be to preformat them to the right file system (NTFS) before beginning the process.

Related: How to Partition and Format a Drive Using PowerShell

Next, give the Storage Space a name, choose a drive letter and resilience type, and enter the size you want it to be. Click on Create storage space to finish setting it up.

Adding details for the storage space

Afterward, you should see the Storage Space show up as a drive when looking at Devices and drives under This PC. It will have the name and drive letter you assigned it.

Adding a Drive to a Storage Space

If you’re someone who likes to keep large files on their computer, you can quickly run out of storage space. A remarkable feature of Storage Spaces is that it makes it easy to add another physical drive to the pool to extend its capacity.

To begin, navigate to the Manage Storage Spaces window, click on Change Settings, and allow the app to make changes to your device. Then, click on Add drives.

Adding drives to a storage space

In the next window, you’ll notice that the OS has checked the Optimize drive usage option by default. You can leave it as it is if you want Windows to distribute files across all drives to use the available space efficiently. However, this will make your PC slow.

Finish the process by clicking Add drives.

Selecting drives to add to storage pool

Deleting a Storage Space

If you wish to use one of the physical drives for something else, you can simply remove it from the pool. Click Prepare for removal under Physical drives in the Manage Storage Spaces window.

Preparing drive for removal in storage space

Windows will start getting the drive ready for removal, and when the process is over, click Remove.

Drive ready to remove in storage space

In the next window, click Remove drive, and you will no longer see the drive in the Storage Space.

Now You’re Ready to Create Storage Spaces

When you have more than one drive connected to your computer, Storage Spaces allow you to combine them effectively. Not only does this allow you to maximize your storage capacity, but it also protects single or multi-drive failure.

As you can see, creating Storage Spaces and adding and removing drives isn’t all that hard. You can use this useful Windows feature to make the multi-drive system of your dreams. But for now, this article should serve as a good overview.