Storage Spaces vs Drive Bender vs Drivepool

Hello everyone,

I have a windows 8 machine that acts as a media storage computer on my home network. It has 8 storage drives varying in size from 1 to 4 TB. I have been using Drive Bender to create pools, however am interested in switching to Storage Spaces.

Currently with Drive Bender I have created several pools for storage of different media (movies, TV shows, Audio, Photos). Each pool has several drives within it. There is no replication of the files within the pools. They are configured as JBOD with 1 mount point.

Since I have no replication of files I need to be able to get files of of a drive if something happens with the program that manages the space. Drive Bender does a good job of this and I never feel like I will lose a file if Drive Bender breaks.

1) Can I get files off of a drive if Storage Spaces "breaks" and how would I do this?

2) Drivepool (not Drive Bender) has several options that allow management of how data is written to the pool of drives (such as filling 1 drive then moving to the next keeping files together). Is this an option with Storage Space?

Thanks for any help you can provide me.

-S

No one has any ideas?