Review by JJCEO

I have built multiple servers using both WHS 2011 and the original WHS V1 Software. They both have advantages but I like WHS 2011 the best. The primary reason is the speed of backups and operation. My WHS 2011 system has 17 TB of drives for video, photo, music and client computer storage.

To install the system took less than an hour but you have to make sure that you have all the drivers you need for a proper setup. I used two SATA II cards and I had to install the drivers onto a USB memory stick to allow me to add them to the server during the system setup and find the 8 drives attached to the cards. I then moved the Photo folder, Video folder and Music folder to different drives to give me 2 TB of storage for each folder. You can also create Video 2, Video 3 folders etc..

Backing up and restoring clients is easy and simple. The Clients are stored on one drive and it has a size of 2 TB (In my case). You might be shocked that it is not larger, but WHS 2011 does not store duplicated files. If you have 3 computers using Windows 7 then it stores a program one time and knows that all three computers share it. This saves time and speed up backups. The old version of WHS would copy the same file three times and waste space and timennThe key feature of WHS 2011 in my opinion is the speed of the backups and the restores. To back up a Windows 7 computer takes about 18 minutes and to restore the same computer took 26 minutes. The original Windows Home Server Version 1 takes hours to back up the same computer. The operating system has been reliable and so far without errors or problems. WHS 2011 also allows you to back up the home server operating system drive to an internal or external disk drive automatically. I do this to an external disk drive and it is insurance in the bank if something happens. I restored the system to see how it works and it is easy and fast.

The downside is that I do miss Drive Extender. I cannot believe that Microsoft dropped it from the software and WHS 2011 will not be as strong of a product without it as it would if it were included. It has cost Microsoft reputation and made this product weaker than it would have been if this feature was still included. Users would not have to worry about folder location and size with Drive Extender as the drive pool would have just automatically handled the space requirements for growing folders. I rank it 4 stars without Drive Extender and it would have been five if it had it!