Category: Storage | Small Laptops and Notebooks

By now, you may have heard that Microsoft has decided to pull Drive Extender from it’s upcoming Windows Home Server V2 (codenamed ‘Vail’). Keep in mind that we are eight months into the beta of Vail. This is not some alpha product and this is not the start of the beta cycle. While WHS V2 was supposed to be out this year, that’s not going to happen at this point, but it’s still significant that we are eight months into the beta, and Microsoft is deciding to remove a key component.

Windows Home Server has a very dedicated following, and manufacturers such as Acer and HP have put a lot of effort and resources into supporting this market with appropriate hardware. Windows Home Server is aptly named – it’s a product targeted towards consumers, and it allows you to put together a small home server using either your own components or buying servers such as HP’s MediaSmart line, that allow you to add up to 4 hard drives. What attracts so many to Drive Extender is that it allows you to see all of those drives as one drive or one storage pool, while duplicating your files and providing some redundancy/backup capabilities that you wouldn’t have with just a single backup or a single drive (such as a USB drive). It also allows you to grow your storage as you need to. One of the really nice things, in addition to not losing data if one disk goes bad, is the ability to pull any of the disks out and read them in another system. It should be noted that that ability unfortunately was going to be removed with Vail, due to changes with Drive Extender, however the changes that necessitate the removal of that ability might have offset that decision. DE was going to become more robust with Vail.

With Windows Home Server, it’s easy to back up your laptops or netbooks or PCs to a central location, as well as provide an easy way to share files between systems. For those who make frequent use of laptops/netbooks, it is very handy to have a place to back your system up to over the network, and it provided some redundancy since the data was duplicated across two drives.

While there are other features that make Windows Home Server attractive, Drive Extender was a major selling point to many people – you didn’t have to be a server expert to put together a large mass storage system to back up your media, your laptops, etc. and it could easily be expanded in the future as you needed more space. Given the high resolution digital cameras and the move to HD video in the consumer market these days, space was becoming a lot more important than in times past. All of it was “out of sight, out of mind” so to speak – you didn’t have to be an expert to setup WHS, expand the storage, and make sure everything was backed up. While WHS had a rough start, it matured quickly into a great solution to a problem that wasn’t being adequately addressed in the past.

I’ve had a few days to digest the news, and it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. After giving up on a similar solution from Apple, WHS was very attractive to me, and HP even supported Apple’s Time Machine solution, which was the best of both worlds – backing up Macs and Windows systems. I’ve used WHS in the past and currently have a WHS system I built that I’m using, but was looking forward to seeing what happened with V2/Vail and perhaps buying a pre-built WHS system, probably from HP due to the Time Machine support.

Apple Insider has a story up about rumors circulating around Apple’s Special Event next week (on September 1, 2010). Apple has sent out invitations to the media for an event in San Francisco at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, starting at 10 am Pacific Time. The invitation has a guitar with an Apple logo cut into it, and you can see it here at AI.

Speculation is that there will be a redesigned Apple TV at a $99 price, and that the focus will be on selling or renting video content to be streamed throught to HDTVs. It’ll possibly have its own apps available through the App Store, allowing for other features that typical DVRs/receivers aren’t capable of, including more mainstream games. Obviously it wouldn’t replace a regular console such as a Sonyt Playstation 3 or Nintendo Wii, however for some the iPhone has replaced handhelds such as the Sony PSP and Nintendo’s DS line, and Apple has refused to support Blu-ray viewing on Macs, something that is a major selling point of the Playstation 3. Apple’s view is that they want content, HD or not, to be purchased through their store or added through iTunes and then consumed on everything from an iMac down to an iPad or iPhone.

I would agree that it will probably be based on Apple’s iOS that powers iPhones and iPads. That makes a lot of sense. A new Apple TV has been described as the “tail end” of Apple’s video strategy, and this doesn’t necessarily make sense in Apple’s overall strategy as far as consumers and home products.

I’ve been asking for some kind of Apple home server since at least January of last year. The reason is that a lot of people who buy Apple products are reaching a critical mass with their devices and computers. I can easily see scenarios where you have some kind of Mac portable (MacBook or MacBook Pro), and an iMac or Mac mini, plus an iPhone or two along with an iPod, and now even an iPad. You are looking at a lot of content that is being consumed (through iTunes Music Store) and a lot of content that is being generated – photos and videos from digital cameras, video cameras (think Flip cameras at Amazon for cheap). Cameras are taking larger resolution photos and even the iPhone 4 is generating HD video content. Both of those start taking up a lot of space.

Microsoft Drops Drive Extender from Windows Home Server

Apple’s Special Event and Where O Where is my Mac Home Server?

SSD Roundup/Benchmarks for MacBook Pros

Western Digital Gets Into SSD Game

Adding eSATA to an Acer Aspire One (tnkgrl)