The Windows Home Server team has no idea what they're doing anymore.

Hey, what do you do if you've got a group of enthousiasts who are pretty vocal about the stuff they love and hate about your product and who have a pretty clear set of wishes for the next version? You do none of that, gimp one feature and then completely drop one of their other favorite features, of course!

Is there some sort of competing WHS team within Microsoft? Some sort of power struggle they're occupied with? Because that's the only reason I can think of for this unprecedented amount of aimless flailing about.

Oh yeah, NSFW blog post title I guess.

Wow, they really dropped the drive extender tech? That was the whole reason WHS was cool. Now there is no advantage to getting WHS over just stuffing your old PC in a closet and configuring sharing and backups.

They need to reconsider this, I had one built with three smaller drives that made one reasonable dive. This was great.

@Bas:It's just another way of saying they are cancelling WHS.

Man, Acer just started to sell this in Mexico and I was waiting for the next version, I guess a Drobo is in my future.

Looks like a Drobo is in everyone's future. I'm certainly not going to wait for Vail anymore even if they do reconsider the decision to drop DE. I love WHS as a product, but I have no faith in the team anymore whatsoever.

Drobo will probably also be my next choice, once my QNAP is retired. Ball.Drop() on this one.

The *only* thing that might justify this move is if they have some information that 3TB drives will be coming out next year and priced around $175.

What a horrible decision. I was actually looking very much forward to Windows Home Server Vail..... I'm not anymore, unless they bring it back.

As someone who abuses Windows Server Enterprise with DPM2010 for use in a home network, my face is very smug right now.

I imagine that there was some politics involved, that the higher-ups were concened that such a useful feature was only being used by the Home Server SKU and that there shouldn't be any gaps in the product feature matrix, so either add DE to all SKUs of Windows Server, or otherwise "make them equal" and this is the end-result.

But you guys know what you're doing, why do you need a "home" product? I don't know why you don't just use DPM like I do, it offers the same protection with much more granularity. I run mine in a Hyper-V instance without any issues.

@W3bbo: Because setting that stuff up is a pain in the *. You have no idea how easy WHS is. Also I'm definitely going to set something like that up for my parents. Also, why the smugness? You're not using DE either.

@Stebet: Even if they do bring it back, I've lost all faith in the product and the team. What if there's another data corruption issue? I can just as easily see them decide not to patch that, now.

This is a load of crap, and I hope someone here can get the message to the WHS team NOT to do this.

I use WHS, and I absolutely love it. I have had one of my drives fail. I just removed from the WHS console, powered down after the server had balanced the storage, replaced the drive with a new one, power on, add drive and woila. Job done.

Removing this feature is the most stupid, horrible, stupid, stupid, stupid thing they could have done, and the comments on the blog post where this was announced shows that we are not alone in thinking this.

So Windows Home Server will no longer be marketed to home users? Got it.

My guess is what is going to happen is that WHS "Vail" is going to fail and then they will either have to scrap the whole product or bring WHS's biggest killer feature back in the following version.

Who are these "partners and customers" that they received feedback from that told them they don't want/need Drive Extender and deduplication? I'll be sticking to my current WHS version till the end of days. Why would I "upgrade" and lose the most impressive WHS features?

FAIL

EDIT: This is too funny.

http://code.google.com/p/greyhole/

As is so often the case... you have no idea what you are talking about.

Yep, that's why I put "I imagine..." first.

I'm not naive enough to assume that politics never comes into product development, and I don't believe something like this was an entirely technical descision. We're not getting the whole story.

EDIT: This is too funny.

The article fails to explain why RAID, when used as an underlying platform, is inappropriate for consumers. I don't know why they can't "Apple-ify" RAID by writing a first-class user layer on top of a RAID-5 storage system.

Given that DE's advantage is its JBOD-like ability to use any disk, I find it interesting that Microsoft chose to restrict WHS boxes to Tier-1 OEMs who love to charge their customers twice as much for a standard part.

If WHS was built off RAID5, it's a simple enough requirement to simply state that all HDD units must be of the same type. I don't believe your average non-technical user is going to add random HDDs to their WHS box, they're going to want the OEM to do it, or expect the system to not require any upgrades at all (given Microsoft is positioning it as a kind of appliance).