Windows Home Server v2 'Vail' Beta: Drive Extender v2 Dissected

@ 2010/04/28
Drive Extender was the biggest component of the secret sauce that made WHS unique from any other Microsoft OS. It was Drive Extender that abstracted the individual hard drives from the user so that the OS could present a single storage pool, and it was Drive Extender that enabled RAID-1 like file duplication on WHS v1. Drive Extender was also the most problematic component of WHS v1 however: it had to be partially rewritten for WHS Power Pack 1 after it was discovered that Drive Extender was leading to file corruption under certain situations. The new Drive Extender solved the corruption issues, but it also slightly changed the mechanism of how it worked, doing away with the “landing zone” concept in favor of writing files to their final destination in the first place.

For WHS v2, Microsoft has once again rewritten Drive Extender, this time giving it a full overhaul. Microsoft hasn’t released the full details on how Drive Extender v2 works, but we do know a few things that are worth discussing.

No comments available.