Product: Windows 8 Company: Microsoft Website: http://www.microsoft.com MSRP: See Pricing Review By: Andre Da Costa with Byron Hinson, Robert Stein contributing

Storage Spaces - Storage Spaces is a new storage management technology exclusive to Windows 8. Storage Spaces simplifies adding additional storage to your computer while sharing some of the characteristics of RAID like redundancy. Storage Spaces utilizes the ReFS (Resilient File System). Storage Spaces created in Windows 8 are not backward compatible with Windows 7.

ReFS (Resilient File System) - ReFS is a newly engineered file system. ReFS, (which stands for Resilient File System), is built on the foundations of NTFS.

• Metadata integrity with checksums.

• Integrity streams providing optional user data integrity.

• Allocate on write transactional model for robust disk updates (also known as copy on write).

• Large volume, file and directory sizes.

• Storage pooling and virtualization makes file system creation and management easy

• Data striping for performance (bandwidth can be managed) and redundancy for fault tolerance.

• Disk scrubbing for protection against latent disk errors.

• Resiliency to corruptions with "salvage" for maximum volume availability in all cases.

• Shared storage pools across machines for additional failure tolerance and load balancing.

Support for Larger Disk  -

• Introduce new and enhance existing API to better enable applications to query for the physical sector size of a disk.

• Enhancing large-sector awareness within the NTFS file system, including ensuring appropriate sector padding when performing extending writes (writing to the end of the file).

• Incorporating large-sector awareness in the new VHDx file format used by Hyper-V to fully support both types of AF disks.

• Enhancing the Windows boot code to work correctly when booting from 4K native disks.

Language Packs

Since the release of Windows Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft made language packs exclusive to the Ultimate and Enterprise editions. With Windows 8, this is no longer the case, whether you are running Windows 8 or Windows 8 Pro, you can download your desired languages and switch between them.

Windows To Go –

Exclusively a Windows 8 Enterprise feature, it is notable for its ability to make Windows portable. Windows To Go is a way for IT departments to create portable copies of Windows they can easily store on an external storage device such as a thumb drive, external hard disk and give their employees. Windows To Go allows you to boot from that portable storage device and be able to access your applications and personal files without any compromise, it is also encrypted. When you boot from a Windows To Go device you cannot access data on the local drive. Windows To Go is available only to customers running the Enterprise edition of Windows 8.

 

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