Windows Home Server Drive Extender is one of the major technical innovations in Windows Home Server. It’s the technology that pools all of your internal and external storage, removing the need to worry about the physical location of your storage. No more drive letters! Automatic folder duplication is another great feature delivered through Drive Extender.
This week, Microsoft published a technical brief for Drive Extender that outlines the technology in detail, covering:
- Features and Functionality
- Benefits
- Comparison to RAID
- Drive Extender Filter and Migrator Service
- The Magic of Tombstones
- Balancing Storage
- NTFS and Drive Extender
- Unhealthy and Missing Hard Drives
It does a great job of explaining some of the dark art of Windows Home Server in a pretty clear way. If you’re interested in understanding how WHS works, it’s a great read.
Download: microsoft.com
November 1st, 2007 at 4:55 pm
A nice read!
Very simple explained. I now understand the basics a bit. Also, I have my system disk in RAID1 for security. I thought that would be a good idea, but I read that RAID isn’t a good idea. Does this mean also for RAID1? I dont seem to have any problems with my RC1 WHS…
November 1st, 2007 at 5:20 pm
RAID drives will work, but are not supported/advised mainly due to potential conflicts with Drive Extender - the theory is that Drive Extender does a better job than RAID….
February 13th, 2008 at 3:00 am
The MS document you linked to recommends NOT running defrag. I find this odd.
February 13th, 2008 at 8:17 am
Not too odd… basicially the document advises not to use the *in-built* defrag program, which was developed for Windows Server 2003 (on top of which WHS sits) and therefore is not compliant with some of Windows Home Server’s special sauce (the drive extender technology). Running the in-build defragger will move around data fragments that WHS has carefully positioned across your drives, leading to a right old mess.
Using a specialist up to date program like Diskeeper or PerfectDisk is fine though, as they have been developed with WHS in mind.
Terry