Create Storage Spaces Shortcut in Windows 10

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. If you use this feature frequently, you can create a special shortcut to open Storage Spaces directly.

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. Also, if you run low on capacity, you can add more drives to the storage pool.

Today, we will see how to create a special shortcut that opens the Storage Spaces dialog directly with one click.

To create the Storage Spaces shortcut in Windows 10, do the following.

1. Right click the empty space on your Desktop. Select New - Shortcut from the context menu (see the screenshot).
2. In the shortcut target box, type or copy-paste the following:

   explorer.exe shell:::{F942C606-0914-47AB-BE56-1321B8035096}

   

3. Use the line "Storage Spaces" without quotes as the name of the shortcut. Actually, you can use any name you want. Click on the Finish button when done.
   
4. Now, right click the shortcut you created and select Properties.
5. On the Shortcut tab, you can specify a new icon if you wish. You can use the icon from the %SystemRoot%\system32\SpaceControl.dll file. Click OK to apply the icon, then click OK to close the shortcut properties dialog window.

Now, you can move this shortcut to any convenient location, pin it to taskbar or to Start, add to All apps or add to Quick Launch (see how to enable Quick Launch). You can also assign a global hotkey to your shortcut.

The command used for the shortcut is a special shell:command which allows opening various Control Panel applets and system folders directly. To learn more about shell: commands available in Windows 10, refer to the following article:

The list of shell commands in Windows 10

That's it.