1. Solid-State Drives
Solid-state drives (SSDs) are a technological
wonder. Adding an SSD drive vastly improves system performance by
making access to stored data an order of magnitude faster. Since SSDs
are memory chips, there are no moving parts, so they also greatly
reduce power consumption. Soon, the majority of laptops and desktop PCs
will use SSDs as their system disk. For tablets and phones, SSDs are
already standard.
An SSD drive is a set of memory chips inside
an enclosure, which has a built-in drive bus interface controller card.
Typically, SSD drives are sold with the SATA III interface, just like
hard drives and optical drives. Older drives, now deprecated, use SATA
II. Some high-performance SSDs are sold as PCI cards, but they are
expensive and uncommon. When you connect a SATA II or III SSD card, you
may be required to switch to AHCI from SATA mode in your system’s
BIOS/UEFI.
A modern PC with Windows 8 on an SSD can boot
in under 10 seconds. Compare that to Windows 7 on a hard drive, which
can take from 45 to 60 seconds. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Over time, SSD devices fragment, just like
all storage devices. You can defragment an SSD just like you do any
other drive—by using the Optimize Drives utility that was discussed in
the previous section. When you run the optimization, you will notice
that the Current Status field indicates the percentage of the device
that has been “trimmed.” TRIM is the command used to rewrite an SSD so that it is optimized.
To install Windows on an SSD drive
1. Disconnect all
drives on your system, except the SSD drive and the drive containing
your Windows 8 installation files (your DVD drive perhaps).
2. Boot up using your Windows 8 installation disk, and start the SETUP program that is located on your installation media.
3. Windows should
recognize your SSD device. Continue with the installation, allowing
Windows to format the disk and install Windows on the SSD.
Installing Windows 8 on an SSD works best as a fresh install.
Tip
Western Digital sells a line of hybrid hard
drives with large SSD caches in them. These devices offer the benefits
of SSDs, along with high disk capacities, at a much lower price.
Tip
Intel’s Smart Response Technology
(SRT) allows an SSD to be first-level storage (cache) in front of hard
drives that serve as second-level storage. The system places system
files and commonly used files on the SSD, while moving less commonly
used files to the hard disk. You will find SRT on modern motherboards,
and the feature is supported by drivers for Windows 8. It can speed up
a system by 40 percent over a hard drive Windows 8 installation.
2. Storage Spaces
With the appearance of Windows 8, Microsoft
has decided to end its development of Windows Home Server. Since
Windows 8 can serve as a media server, the unique disk pooling solution
of Home Server has been moved into Windows 8, where it’s called Storage
Spaces.
Storage Spaces are logical containers that
combine a group of physical disks into a resource pool to which a drive
letter is assigned. The resource pool can be any size, and the disks it
contains can be any size or type—both SATA and USB drives can be used.
If the drive manager can recognize the storage device, it can be added
to a pool. This ad hoc addition of storage is known as thin provisioning.
Since a Storage Space is an abstract
container, it can be “larger” than the available disk space. As you run
out of real available space, Windows 8 will ask you to add more disks.
So, for example, you could create a 2 TB space called Document Space
and a 6 TB space called Media Space even though your Storage Space pool
contains a set of disks that add up to only 3 TB .
Storage Spaces lets you create and manage protected pools of storage.
A space protects the data it contains by
either mirroring it (RAID 1) or using disk parity (RAID 3). Mirrors and
parity require that data be stored on multiple physical drives. If a
mirror or parity disk fails, an alert box informs you of the problem.
If you have enough free disk space in the right place, Storage Spaces
rebuilds the lost redundant element. Otherwise, you need to install
another disk. It’s kind of like a credit default swap, but for your
data.
To create a Storage Space
1. Press 
+X or right-click the lower-left corner of your display to open the Management menu.
2. Select the Control
Panel command to open the Control Panel dialog box. Click System And
Security, and then click Storage Spaces. The Storage Spaces control
panel appears .
The Storage Spaces control panel
3. Click the Create a new pool and storage space link. You will be asked to elevate your privileges to administrator. Tap or click Yes.
4. In the Create A Storage Pool dialog box , select the drives you want to use and click OK.
Select the drives you wish to include in your storage pool.
5. Give the storage space a name ;
choose a setting from the Resiliency Type menu; and give the storage
space a size. Tap or click the Create Storage Space button.
The Create A Storage Space screen allows you to define the name, type of resiliency, and size of the Storage Space.
After you create a Storage Space, you can modify its size. Click the Manage Storage Space link to open a dialog box that lets you add and remove disks from the resource pool.
Tip
A Storage Space is only useful if it protects
your data, so always mirror or stripe your Storage Spaces. Striping
gives higher performance but uses more disk space than a 2-way mirror.
