TechMicrosoftMicrosoft Announces the Removal of Drive Extender from Windows...
MicrosoftWindows Home ServerSoftwareNews

Microsoft Announces the Removal of Drive Extender from Windows Home Server Code Name Vail and Aurora

By Andrew Edney

-

- Advertisement -

Today, in a bit of a shock announcement, Microsoft told the world that Drive Extender, one of the main components of Windows Home Server V1, has been removed from Windows Home Server Code Name Vail and Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials.

WHS Vail new logo

What Was Drive Extender?

This is how Microsoft described Drive Extender in their published Technical Brief:

Windows® Home Server Drive Extender is a new storage technology that enables you to use internal and external hard drives for additional storage on your home server. In addition, you can enable Folder Duplication for specific shared folders on their home servers. Maintaining two copies of a shared folder on separate hard drives helps protect against the failure of a single hard drive.

Features and Functionality

The core features of Windows Home Server Drive Extender are:

· Predefined Shared Folders

Your home server is preconfigured with shared folders named Photos, Music, Videos, Public, and Software. From the Windows Home Server Console you can specify user permissions for these folders and create new shared folders. You can easily move files and folders from your home computers into the shared folders on your home server by using a drag-and-drop operation.

· Easy to add more storage

From the Windows Home Server Console, you can add a new hard drive to your home server by following a simple wizard. The amount of storage available to your shared folders and home computer backups increases proportionally. The hard drives you add can be either internal or external (for example, USB 2.0 or FireWire).

· Shared Folder duplication

If you have two or more hard drives on your home server, Windows Home Server helps protect against hard drive failures by ensuring that files stored in shared folders are automatically duplicated to multiple hard drives.


Benefits

Windows Home Server Drive Extender offers the following benefits for storage solutions. Some of the benefits are:

· Allows the seamless addition of more hard drives

As you add more hard drives to your home server, they are treated as a single large pool of available storage space. You no longer need to deal with drive letters (such as E:, F:, and G: ) because you can add more hard drives.

· Works with internal and external hard drives

You can add internal or external (for example, USB 2.0 or FireWire) hard drives to your home server to increase the available storage.

· Shared Folder Duplication

Windows Home Server Drive Extender supports reliability by duplicating designated shared folders. Important data is stored on separate hard drives, which provides protection against hard-drive failure. Duplication is configurable for every shared folder—so a shared folder can have multiple copies with each copy stored on a separate hard drive.

· Makes hard drives and their content easy to move

It is easy to remove outdated hard drives. You can store the content on other hard drives in the system and remove old or small hard drives.

Windows Home Server Drive Extender is different than and more powerful than a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) in several ways:

  • You can use any hard drive, any time. You are not restricted to adding more hard drives of the same type and size. When you want to grow your home server storage, you can buy and add any hard drive you like.
  • Internal and external hard drives can be used to grow your storage. No space in your home computer case? No problem—plug in one or more hard drives of your choice.
  • Drive removal is easy. After you have had your home server for awhile, you may want to remove older, smaller hard drives and add new, larger hard drives so that you can store more files.

So, as you can see, all of the above will not be included in Windows Home Server Code Name Vail.

Back in April, we posted about all the promised improvements to Drive Extender in Vail. I think you will agree they sounded really interesting, and worth having to protect your important data and make life easier for you. Its a real shame to see this core functionality removed.

If you want similar functionality now you will have to look for a third party product that supports Windows Server 2008 R2.

As yet I have not seen a build of Windows Home Server Code Name Vail without Drive Extender built in so it is very hard to comment on how the overall experience changes. Watch this space!

Also, this will affect Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials (what was code name Aurora).

What Have Microsoft Said Today?

Here is what Microsoft have said today about it:

When we first started designing Windows Home Sever code name “Vail” one of our initial focuses was to continue to provide support for multiple internal and external hard drives. Drive Extender provided the ability to take the small hard drives many small businesses and households may have acquired, and pool them together in a simple volume. During our current testing period for our SBS 2011 Essentials and Windows Home Server code name “Vail” products, we have received feedback from partners and customers about how they use storage today and how they plan to use it moving forward. Today large hard drives of over 1TB are reasonably priced, and freely available. We are also seeing further expansion of hard drive sizes at a fast rate, where 2Tb drives and more are becoming easy accessible to small businesses.

When weighing up the future direction storage in the consumer and SMB market, the team felt the Drive Extender technology was not meeting our customer needs. Customers also told us that they wanted easier access to data stored on Drive Extender drives so they are able to view these files outside of Drive Extender. Therefore, moving forward we have decided to remove the Drive Extender technology from Windows Home Server Code Name “Vail” (and Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials) which are currently in beta.

While this removes the integrated ability for storage pooling of multiple hard drives and automated data duplication, we are continuing to work closely with our OEM partners to implement storage management and protection using industry standard RAID solutions, as well as other software solutions. This will provide customers greater choice as well as a seamless experience that will meet their storage needs. Customers will also have access to the in-built storage solutions Windows Server 2008 R2 provides for data protection, including software RAID support. We are also still delivering core features such as automated Server and PC backup, easy sharing of folders and files, Remote Web Access and simplified management without any expected changes.

Target product availability is still H1 2011, and we expect to deliver a new beta without drive extender for Windows Home Server Code Name “Vail” and Small Business Server 2011 Essentials early in the New Year.

Your Say!

So, what do you think about this? Is this something that bothers you? Or don’t you really care about the removal of this functionality?

Andrew Edney
Andrew Edney
I am the owner and editor of this site. I have been interested in gadgets and tech since I was a little kid. I have also written a number of books on various tech subjects. I also blogged for The Huffington Post and for FHM. And I am honoured to have been a Microsoft MVP since January 2008, including as an Xbox MVP until 2023.
Previous article
WD TV Live and WD TV Live Plus Gets Updated
Next article
The Home Server Show 114

76 COMMENTS

  2. This is a HUGE, HUGE step backwards. One of the only compelling reasons for home users to purchase Windows Home Server was the Drive Extender & Folder duplication technology. Removing these features makes the "new" version of the product completely useless going forward. I can't for the life of me imagine why Microsoft is gutting one of it's most compelling & well thought out offerings in the last 10 years. I know I won't be upgrading without these features.

    • It just might be time to replace my Vail test box with a WHS v1. This is is sad news.

    • I don't understand what they are trying to say, so we now have 1 and 2tb disks, it's not like files aren't getting larger or we're storing less.

      Yes we will have more files, more disks and more manual hotch potch redundancy.

      Thanks so much Microsoft for screwing this one up once again.

      • I'll be honest, I don't understand what they are trying to say either in that respect.

        People will want to use different size drives, not all the same size, that was one of the major advantages of DE over something like RAID.

    • Single Instance Storage would only help if the storage was filled with the same or similar files, in the home server setup the server would be filled with television shows, music and photos, something Single Instance Storage would have no benefit to.

  7. "Customers also told us that they wanted easier access to data stored on Drive Extender drives so they are able to view these files outside of Drive Extender"….

    "implement storage management and protection using industry standard RAID solutions"….

    Erm, how does using RAID help? I thought any drives in a raid array couldn't just be taken out and plugged into another machine?

    I'm not too fussed about loosing the storage pooling but loosing the data duplication is a big deal for me so that just gives me another reason to stick with v1 especially as my current server is 32bit…

  8. This is an insane move, takes the unique and scalable feature of Windows Home Server and sticks it straight in the trash.

    A software raid under windows server is no replacement, to pretend so is to show how little they understand the audience.

    This feels like a complete sell out of a great product.

    • i ABSOLUTELY agree.

      a little over a year ago i was looking for a server solution, and this one nerd from work kept trying to get me to build a linux samba server with hardware raid. around the same time i caught wind of WHS, and i couldnt help but think that the MS implementation was perfect for a home environment (and particularly, my needs). the two main features being: 1) ability to add drives of various sizes as needed; and 2) being able to remove drives from the array and access the data in case of problems. my linux friend started his raid array with two 400gb drives, and was having a very difficult time locating another 400gb drive a year later when he needed to add more space to his server. he ended up only getting 2 since max capacity was 4 drives due to there only being 4 ports on his raid controller. since building my WHS, i have added 6 1tb drives (some replacing smaller 250gb drives, some just growing the pool). that was clutch, and when the time comes, i can replace those 1tb drives with 5tb drives. there was this other time he came into work and told me how his array broke. i dont remember the exact details, but there was a write error or something, and it couldnt rebuild and he lost the data on both disks since he couldnt get anything to read the data off the drives due to the proprietary file system. one time, just because i felt like testing it, i removed a drive from my WHS (when it was off) and hooked it up to another machine via usb drive dock and i copied some files over (even on my mac). i put it back into my WHS, started her up, and everything loaded without a hitch.

      leading up to the vail announcement, i couldnt wait for the new version of whs. half of the wind got taken out of my sails when i learned that microsoft decided to use a proprietary file system (guess they never read any of the drobo forums). today, there is no more wind as they removed arguably the best part of WHS: drive extender. what is the point of WHS now? might as well get server 2008 if you need the advanced features, or build a windows 7 box with a raid card and use homegroups to share with client HTPCs. as i see it, both of those are better options than the new WHS. i just dont get why microsoft took something that wasnt broke (arguably, as ive had no incidents) and try "fix" it by demolishing it.

      plus i like the old dashboard.

  11. I'm sorry, but is Vail floundering? Watching the forums and the feedback on Connect I really don't remember seeing a whole lot about the drive pool being worthless, but there was a lot of concern about not being able to get to the data on a drive outside of the WHS server.

    So, to make it available they're going to drop all of drive extender? Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water.

    • They've over reacted to the whole 'concerned users' which is a tiny group compared to those getting a lot of comfort from VAIL's drive redundancy feature.

  12. I was on the fence about upgrading when Vail came out. Having to conform to same size drives in RAID configurations will make it too costly. What a shame MS once again misses the boat.

  13. Since Microsoft still haven't given WHS v2 a final name, they should use "Windows Home Server Vista", a nice UI but all broken underneath.

  16. Storage pools & duplication where the primary reasons I used WHS. I duplicate everything and have one share that's over 5TB so needs pooling. Guess it depends on what the third party alternatives are, but since I need to look elsewhere I'll be on v1 for awhile and expand my search beyond WHS. Guess my Vail test box will be put to other uses since Vail will be a step back from v1.

  17. Wow! this is HUGE news! Without drive extender, Home Server become's almost pointless. Hardware raid is too expensive as others here have noted. I was planning to hold of on building a Vail box, but now I just may not build on at all.

  18. RAID? really, the most unreliable solution on the planet, unless you are a IT pro. Even then it always fails at some point. Businesses have the money to afford a lot of disks and expensive warranties and still have crazy expensive tape or SAN backups running just in case. DE was a simple solution for home users. MS has forgotten why they built "home server". They should stop trying to make lesser business solutions on top of their home users backs. DE was the reason Home Server was so nice. I guess I will stick to my Version 1 till it is no longer supported. I hope MS changes there mind when it comes to DE

  19. Why would you take out one of the most important elements; the protection of users data, and it's ability to be increased easily?!

    Total madness, I shall be sticking with WHS v1.

  21. Also good to see that all the complaints in the comments on the official windowsteamblog site have been deleted and further comments closed.

    So very silly

  22. is that $80 newegg deal still available. I think I will pick up a couple of extra copies while supplies last. I was excited about upgrading but now I will not. I am not one of "the many customers that are unhappy" Quite frankly, this ticks me off. The little fish are going to be fried for big money customers that don't know what they need.

  23. Over the past five years I've moved from a hardware raid under Windows Server 2003 (software based arrays are super slow), to a drobo that could handle variable disk sizes and and upgrade path, to Windows Home Server (V1) with drive extender to VAIL beta with drive extender.

    Each upgrade has brought it's own benefits, but these don't exist without drive extender, and I sure as hell am not going back to mirroring my own data.

    This isn't an upgrade and it's a home product any more. Nice move Microsoft, you got the business users at the expense of everyone else.

  25. Hey Andrew you better find a new website address because I do not know if we all will be usingwindowshomeserver in the future.

    Ha

  26. Microsoft: You should fire your analyst! The analysis of your customers needs seems to fit some of you're previous analysises ("640K ought to be enough for anybody" and "The Internet? We are not interested in it")…

  30. What'd I miss? Is it April 1 or something?

    MS can stop trying to enhance DE. It works. Just port it over to Vail.

    Then we can have the ability to read WHS drives on other systems back, and we can pretend that this craziness never happened.

  32. The Home Server Blog said "the ability to include larger drives, this will reduce the need for Drive Extender functionality." I'm thinking the risk of drive failure increase and data loss will be greater since more data is on one drive, therefore DE is even more important.

    The problem is that Microsoft put the WHS team under the SBS team and Small Business is OK with a RAID solution since they have the manpower and expertise, so they are happy with this decision. But since the team has been bundled with WHS, WHS suffers the consequences also and the average home user needs a simple solution. So the WHS guy gets burnt.

  35. Well I have been a long time user of WHS v1 ever since the first beta…in fact I migrated across from win2k3. In my house I have two WHS servers with each server hosting 20 GB on each made up of lots of different disks of different sizes and ages.

    So now where's the upgrade path now Microsoft…the worst decision I have heard of for years and I have been an working with WinTel systems for over 15 years…gees its Vista all over again.

  36. It is already possible to remove the DE from the current beta to get a glimpse on what we will get. A box with JBOD with simple features that are already available as Open Source.

    One should do the same as one ever did. Take the best features that will not make it into the RTM build from the beta and hack them in the final.

  38. Big step back, I really can't understand what Microsoft expects to gain. DE is a critical element of WHS!

  39. without DE what is the difference between WHS and a normal version of windows?

    I guess I wont be moving from a linux raid solution to whs (for simplicity) now.

    Possibly could setup a manual backup solution on windows using a tool like rsync to duplicate data across drives. Sounds like work though 😛

  40. Guys,

    I have to say I am glad DE is going away. I don't use any of the "benefits" in my V1 WHS and was looking forward to having it effectively disabled in my v2 upgrade. I am using hardware raid with about 16 TB of storage and having one large Raid 6 partion will be nice in V2, RAID 60 is I want some more speed. DE just sucks for Streaming Video and is what I use my box for mainly with MyMovies.

    • Why even use WHS then? You could use XP or Windows 2000 for your purposes. DE was the only reason to use WHS…

      • ease of client back ups and mymovies. Why do people thing DE is the bomb? I have never understood DE's value as it is a software raid 1.

        DE slows down streaming performance, and hardware RAID is cheep.

        • For non technical people who dont want to learn or worry about RAID, the concept behind DE was great. You could take any drive, of any size, plug it in and it could be used. You cant do that with conventional RAID. I appreciate that some people are not bothered its gone, as you said, for streaming its probably better that its not there, but you could have added a drive to WHS and not had it as part of the pool for your media if the storage pool was a major issue.

          • I have 1080P video streaming from my WHS to three different Popcornhour devices and they all work perfectly with DE, even when all devices are being used simultaneously. A RAID solution offers no benfits for me, only hassles. I have not heard of any complaints of streaming issues using DE.

      • You still have the great backup and recovery side of things, plus remote access (if you want it) and streaming (again if you want it). I primarily use my WHS as a backup and recovery tool, but dont get me wrong, I am not pleased that DE is gone from Vail (and that is the polite way of descibing how I feel)!

  42. Clever marketing ploy to sell off last stocks of WHS v.1?

    I have been running the trial v1 and reinstalling every month waiting for Vail to come out of beta or improve a little.

    Today I just bought v.1 and will be sticking with it

  43. Time to look to open source like Amahi. I was going to play with it, but now think I might look to it for my permanent solution.

  45. The streaming features in Vail are useless for most of use with the crappy upload speeds Time Warner and the other cable companies give us for home internet access. 384k upload for Road Runner Broad band at over $50 a month. Without DE and these new features that can't be use by me, I wouldn't upgrade either. They need a tool to read the new file system in non-vial OS and then just leave the DE 2.0 in there. That's what people want, DE and Media Center. With half the features it better be half the cost if it comes out as is.

  46. I'm shocked. It doesn't make any sense. This JBOD is the main reason I bough WHS in the first place.

    I know I will not by WHS2…

    I am a big MS fan/developer but decisions like this make it pretty easy to question them…in a not so nice way. 🙁

  47. Classic Coke!

    Folks this sounds like Classic Coke. Drive Extender is such a wonderful technology – I have gone from 500 GB to 3.5 TB as my media files have grown – and folder duplication is such an enhancer of peace of mind that I am stunned.

    Microsoft is known to never keep its customers stranded, but this is what it is doing here.

    Folks, stay true to your culture and reverse this decision please.

    Coke made a mistake with the New Coke and came roaring back with Classic Coke.

    Best,

    SRM

    • Yeah.

      Unfortunately Drive Extender isnt going to go back into WHS – at least not in WHS 2011.

      Had some very interesting conversations with DataCore about their add-in to deliver DE like functionality – more on that very soon.

Comments are closed.

Stay connected

7,137FansLike
8,566FollowersFollow
27,000SubscribersSubscribe

LATEST REVIEWS

Reviews

Review: Clean Up Earth

Daniel Waite -
A cleaning game where you can help Earth. https://youtu.be/TuFq_bHUzgI

Review: Manairons

Review: Our Adventurer Guild

Review: ICARUS Console Edition

Review: BOULDERDASH 40th Anniversary

Review: Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties 

You might also likeRELATED
Recommended to you

Reviews

Review: ICARUS Console Edition

https://youtu.be/ruebYhAlbaQ?si=Kw7YgX5OW7vylyaA Five years since its initial release on PC, Icarus...
Matt Cooper -
Reviews

Review: Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties 

https://youtu.be/tlIyy-P9avw?si=PssIrVuDX2M55KT- Developers Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios have been on a...
Matt Cooper -
News

Virtual Reality Revolutionizes the Film Industry

The film industry has always grown by pushing creative...
Christopher John -
News

Why Frictionless Giving Is Changing Humanitarian Support

The way people give to charity is undergoing a...
Christopher John -