Provided are a computer program product, system, and method for determining the location for volumes of data being initially stored within a storage space, regardless of the physical location of the data. The storage space includes stripes composed of volumes, which can be logically represented as a utilization histogram of stripe locations offset from one another. Sometime the stripes are fully allocated with one large volume or partially allocated with multiple, arbitrary-sized smaller volumes. When there are multiple smaller volumes that do not utilize all of the available stripe space, gaps form. To minimize the creation of such gaps, when a volume of data is initially stored, a start location to place the volume of data is selected by using selection criteria as guidance.