Windows Home Server 'Vail' Release Candidate (minus Drive Extender) goes to testers

I've been a huge fanboy of Windows Home Server since the first time I heard a brief description of it. I've written blog posts about it, written software to run on it, and recommended it to everyone I know. My WHS box has made my life so much easier and I feel so much more secure knowing it backs up my other PCs nightly automatically with little or no fuss. My kids love it because it streams out movies to the XBOX downstairs. My wife loves it because it holds all our pictures and home movies and even has duplicates in case there is a drive failure. Everything is stored there. No longer are there some files on my PC and some files on my wife's and some others on my laptop.

Most of all my favorite feature, THE Killer Feature, of WHS is Drive Extender. This nifty piece of functionality allows you to add whatever kind of hard drive you want to the PC, whether internal or external USB or whatever. And it treats them all as ONE big drive. You don't need to know anything about RAID or RAID controllers or ... well.. anything. It's drop dead simple - you start getting low on drive space you go find a 1TB external drive on sale somewhere and plug it into an open USB port. Done. If you have specific folders set to make duplicates of (like your photos or home movies or important documents) then the internals of Drive Extender will magically ensure that those copies are on separate physical drives to protect your assets from a single hard drive failure. It may be the most simple piece of computer hardware/sofware that I have ever used.

Guess what? Microsoft ripped Drive Extender out of Windows Home Server 2011. I heard that rumoured months ago but I figured they would come to their senses. Apparently not.I am so disappointed. How can you release version two of a product that doesn't include the best feature of version one?!?!

According to Mary Jo Foley, the author of the article linked above, Microsoft's recommendation is to "use products from various storage providers instead". Really? If I have to start piecing together a solution then I'm not going to bother with Windows Home Server! What's the point. WHS made it stupid easy. If you take that away then it's really no use - at least to me. If I have to learn about storage hardware I'll instead just buy a LAN-based storage server (probably built on Linux!) that will handle all my file server needs easily, maybe even stupid easily. More than likely I'll just keep on keeping on with my version of Windows Home Server v1.

I know my one little voice doesn't amount to much if anything, but please reconsider. I will not upgrade and I know I am not alone.