Michael Leworthy of Windows Home Server Blog today announced, that Microsoft will remove its Drive Extender technology from the Home Server product. Microsoft Home Server is an easy to use solution for backing up your home or small business computers. It is usually sold as ready to use box – inlcuding hardware that is.
WHS just runs runs and back ap your computers. Additionally you can add several plugins such as iTunes media server and many more.
Drive Extender is some kind of a software RAID system. You can plug in multiple (different sized if you want) hard drives, and DE combines them to one big volume including redundancy. It works seamlessly for me here. I have 4 drives: 2 1TB ones and 2 500GB ones.
Michael lined out that the WHS figured that large harddrives became cheap lately (1 TB for under $100), which would make it less desirable for customers to combine these. So they deiced to rely on standard Windows Server 2008 technologies for WHS.
To me this doesn’t make much sense though: what if I wanted to combine two 2TB drives? Or even more? With redundancy in the back? Sure I can buy a hardware RAID, but the idea of WHS was to provide a low cost (yet stable) solution. A hardware RAID is certainly not helping in keeping the price tag small…
The next beta (with Drive Extender removed) of Home Server V2 (Vail) is expected to be released “early in the New Year”, Michael said.
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