The Death of the Drive Letter ...

  • Article

Windows Home Server Drive Extender is a new technology incorporated into Windows Home Server that makes it easy for consumers to easily add more disk space to their home servers.  Users will no longer have worry about disk drive letters (C:, D:, E:, etc. etc.) as they had more hard drives to their home server, since Windows Home Server treats the disk space as a large pool of available space.  Remember this product is supposed to be easy to use, but also really cool ...

Windows Home Server Drive Extender provides the reliability benefits of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) with the ability to use internal and/or external hard drives (USB 2.0 or FireWire) of varying sizes for additional storage.   Once you add an external hard disk it is considered part of the home server storage, and you should not plan on removing it unless you no longer need it attached to your home server.   New hard drives added to Windows Home Server are formatted before they are added to the available disk space, so be sure to copy any valuable content off of an external hard drive before running the Add wizard in the Windows Home Server Console.

Windows Home Server supports reliability by duplicating designated shared folders – so important data (e.g. your Photos, Music, etc.) will be stored on separate hard drives helping to provide protection against hard drive failure.  Folder Duplication is configurable on a per shared folder basis, so a given shared folder can have multiple copies, with each one being stored on a separate hard drive.

 

One big benefit of this easy to use new technology is that it is easy to remove hard drives and the contents are automatically moved to other hard drives in your home server so that over time you can remove the older, smaller hard drives.

 

How is it different from RAID solutions?

 

  • Any hard drive, any time. You are not restricted to simply adding more hard drives of the same type and size. When you want to grow your home server storage, you just buy whatever hard drive you like and add it.
  • Internal and external hard drives can be used to grow your storage. No space in your home server case? No problem, plug in one or more USB 2.0 or FireWire hard drives.
  • Hard drive removal, as explained above. As your home server gets crufty, it will be important to remove the older smaller hard drives and put in new larger hard drives so you can store more stuff.

t.