It is not a huge secret that I am a big believer in Microsoft Windows Home Server. It is the engine behind my home network which runs on a HP Mediasmart 470. WHS backs up every machine in the house nightly, allows me to stream music and movies to my TV and other computers, gives me remote access to to the server from any location in the world and most importantly allows me to install hard drives of different sizes in the server and have the drives viewed as one volume with files and folders duplicated across multiple disk for safety. This is called “drive extender” by Microsoft and was a huge selling point for the operating system. The home user could tell WHS to duplicate folders and files across dissimilar sized disks and be assured that his data was safe. Microsoft decided yesterday to remove this feature from the next version of Windows Home Server because “… Drive Extender technology was not meeting our customers needs.”
Microsoft goes on to say that they expect OEMs to fill the vacuum that is being left behind by not continuing drive extender into the VAIL upgrade. The problem is that the drive extender is a core WHS technology and not an add-on that you can reasonably expect others to make. Secondly, home consumers don’t want to and shouldn’t have to deal with the concept of RAID in order to get file and folder duplication. WHS gave it to them out of the box with drive extender. In fact, Microsoft was so proud of the fact that WHS didn’t require the home consumer to use RAID, they wrote about it here.
Is the removal of this technology and the uproar it has caused fatal to Microsoft’s financial bottom line? Of course not. But those people who were going to upgrade to the new OS will (or should) have second thoughts once the drive extender technology is removed. Fortunately, I don’t have any seconds thoughts. The removal of the technology is a deal breaker for me and I can no longer recommend WHS as the all in one solution for a home network. For that I am really sad.