When I fire up Storage Spaces it say there are no drives available, it doesn’t give me any options to do anything with my boot drive.

Unless you have any drives that don’t have anything on them you can’t set up Storage Spaces. It takes over the physical drives you allocate to it completely.

Ok, it really isn't an equivalent for what you can do on the Mac, with a standard install then, which is fine.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

Or not. The standard window management is still there, along with their other various past half hearted attempts to "solve" the windowing problem.

I'll be sticking with BetterSnapTool, it makes more sense to me than any of Apple's attempts at window management.

Looking at the videos, it does seem strange, not sure if it is something I would use either. It will be hard enough getting used to having a menu system that changes at the top of the screen depending on what you are doing

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

Can it ? Microsoft's description of it sounds like something very different and RAID-like:

"Storage Spaces helps protect your data from drive failures and extend storage over time as you add drives to your PC. You can use Storage Spaces to group two or more drives together in a storage pool and then use capacity from that pool to create virtual drives called storage spaces. These storage spaces typically store two copies of your data so if one of your drives fails, you still have an intact copy of your data. If you run low on capacity, just add more drives to the storage pool."

Can it, from a standard install of Windows:

- add a new "partition", on the same drive as the existing OS
- install a new OS to that partition
- boot from either OS install

?

On the Mac doing this is two steps:

- create new APFS volume in Disk Utility, takes 30 seconds
- run the installer for the new OS

I'm off to investigate Storage Spaces some more 😉

Never used it, but I have read about and I came to that conclusin that it is a raid type thing, not sure what advantage it would have over raid since most motherboards these days offer raid.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Never used it, but I have read about and I came to that conclusin that it is a raid type thing, not sure what advantage it would have over raid since most motherboards these days offer raid.

In that case, I'm afraid that you haven't read enough, or tried it. Storage Spaces is much more than just software RAID - as I said before it is more akin to ZFS. Some features additional to RAID are data compression, data deduplication, thin provisioning of volumes, and different levels of data redundancy (approximately, RAID level) in the same storage pool. Thin provisioning is probably the most important aspect in this context, allowing flexible use of available storage space.

TBH, most people are a little vague about what RAID is, let alone the newer enhancements like ZFS, Btrfs, APFS, and Storage Spaces. Synology provide similar facilities on their NASs with SHR.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

Understood, but it also doesn't address the use case that we were talking about here.

It is probably one area were Windows is ahead of the Mac. Apple seem very uninterested in the software RAID functionality that is hidden away in the OS and it is very vanilla RAID 0/1/5.

Which make sense I guess, given they only have a single model that can support multiple internal drives.

I'll bet there are about as many end users using Windows Storage Spaces as there are Mac users using Apple's software RAID 😉

BIB, this is the one thing that niggles me about a Mac. I have been building and using PC machines since 1997, I have updated these machines, added extra and stuff like even my Amiga I could change the hard drive and memory.

If i go for a Mac mini, I have to realise that it is what it is and it can't be updated, this is why I am waiting for the new model, something faster than what is there now and maybe get something with 16GB or more ram, storage space is not a huge problem, plenty of external docks that a drive can be put in and sit under the computer, plus i have the Nas.

The only thing I have updated on my computer in the last couple of years is storage, I put in a 960GB SSD, but only because it was a good price when i was getting stuff for my brother
I will have to do some more research and see how the M1 and M2 chip compare with AMD offerings and make sure the software I am going to use work with the Apple Silicon directly, last time I looked some of it did not.
I was going to do it while off work this week, but I have not been feeling great for the last few days, so I have not really felt like doing so.,
I did think about a iMac, an all-in-one system, would be kind of nice, but I have a good monitor and since i will still be keeping the machine i have, it is not going to add any less stuff to the room.

but i will certainly have a look at some more videos on the new Mac Os.

Don’t do it Adrian. Stick to Windows.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I will have to do some more research and see how the M1 and M2 chip compare with AMD offerings and make sure the software I am going to use work with the Apple Silicon directly, last time I looked some of it did not.

I wouldn't worry too much about that. Unless you have a pretty high end desktop x86 processor at the moment, you'll likely find the M1/2 run your x86 code a lot faster than you'd imagine. It really is close to native speed (and for the right app can actually be faster than it would be on the fastest Intel Macs).

I still have a few Intel apps, but I couldn't tell you which ones were not native, without looking at Activity Monitor.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Don’t do it Adrian. Stick to Windows.

LOL, It will be a nice change to be honest, I hope. There is a Mac style OS available, that I installed, to see if I can get used to the U.I, it is Linux, but then Mac Os is BSD. I can't remember what distro it was, but it was very much like the Mac desktop, I don't mean it just had a Dock either.

Windows is going a way I don't really want it to, the forced Ms account on Windows 11 and yes I know uses Apple ID, but it is not forced, even telemetry is not forced on Macs.
I know Mac Os is a bit of a closed shop, But then windows is becoming like that and have been since Windows 8 to be honest.