Windows Storage Spaces on Windows 8, anyone using this?

[Christoph21x]

We should open a thread about such supporting tools.

Using drivepool - can I write to this pool directly or do I have to address the local drives? If write to the pool, a ¨filling order¨?
And.. does this pool can also contain NAS´s?

[Infidelus]

Similar to two other replies, I use some dedicated software, but I chose Drive Bender. It's probably worth checking both out so you can see the pros and cons of them. I assume DrivePool has a fully functional trial, and I know Drive Bender does.

[Hominidae]

We should open a thread about such supporting tools.

Using drivepool - can I write to this pool directly or do I have to address the local drives? If write to the pool, a ¨filling order¨?
And.. does this pool can also contain NAS´s?

Maybe you're right...sorry for highjacking this thread but AFAIU the OP and others are not very fond of Storage Spaces...so I tried to throw in an alternative and not to highjack.
..as to your questions:
You can do both...address individual drives (but data written directly will not reside in the pool) or address the pool, which is the normal way.
There are different balancers as plugings, so you can control the way the disks in the pool get filled up.
You also have the abilitiy to run more than one pool on the same box.
With DrivePool there is no write striping (though there is read striping if a file is available on more than one disk, i.e. when it has been stored as duplicated).
Because there is no striping a file will always be completely written to/reside on the same disk..duplication creates copies on other disks.

No, the pool can only be made of real, physical disks...so including a drive via network filesystem mapping would not work.
However, you could try and include a remote iSCSI volume ... AFAIK windoze will enable this target as a normal disk and DivePool should see it.

[Christoph21x]

Thank you all for your explanations. This sounds really awesome. Searched for such a functionality for a long time before NAS´s.

[PaulAEvans]

Thank you all for your explanations. This sounds really awesome. Searched for such a functionality for a long time before NAS´s.

Chris I would also add my recommendation for Drivrepool it just works and has great flexibly. Just set up DrivePool as the shared record folder and everything drops into place... Well recommended.

[Malyngo]

DrivePool also seems like a good solution. If you lose one drive, you only lose the files on that drive, but not all of them.
Still, I really would like to have that resilience to be able to lose a drive, and lose nothing.

I have now changed the case of my mediacenter to a Fractal Node 804 (can really recommend that one for building a system with lots of disks in) and created a Storage Space with 3 4TB Seagate NAS drives. Write speed is 28MB/s, so more than enough.

No I still have one more drive, and might try to see what happens if I add that to the pool, and then start to copy things around, if that will balance things out again on the disks. Or maybe I just wait, storage space should be sufficient for quite some time, and maybe Microsoft will add rebalancing in a later version. But if I want to test adding a new drive and rebalance by copying stuff around, I probable should do that rather sooner than later, as long as there is still a lot of unused space.