Do not, and I repeat, do NOT go the Windows Home Server route if you don't want to get very frustrated. Trust me. Here's a detailed of my experience with WHS. Should be enough to throw anybody off.

(this is a cut and paste job of something I've posted somewhere else)

Oh yeah, on another note, I stumbled onto a project called Ubuntu Home Server. But alas, it seems that project has come to an early halt...
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I wanted to setup a 'video jukebox'. Basically ripping all my 700 or so DVD's I have onto harddisk and stream them from a server to a media extender.

I had a choice between Linux, a regular NAS (which also run Linux, but is FAR easier to set up) and Windows. A couple of months ago, WHS was released, and it sounded like the product I had been waiting for all that time. I read a lot of reviews about it, and they all were raving about this '(one of the) best products MS had ever released'. NONE mentioned the big iussue I stumbled upon. An issue which I believe is unpardonable because everybody will bump into it sooner or later.

In my case it was sooner.

I started to save up (this took a couple of months), and I was overjoyed when I finally had all the necessary components to build my own WHS in-house. These were a recent G33 chipset motherboard with an Intel dual core chip (E2200) on it, 2GB RAM (RAM is cheap these days), and 3 harddisks: one Samsung 250 GB drive as the C: and 2 Samsung 750 GB drives as the Storage drives.

I setup the server and everything went smooth. Then I started to copy all my rips (which I had mostly done beforehand and stored on my desktop pc) to the server. I got some serious good speeds (after having installed the most recent drivers of my onboard NIC's - VERY important!), 70+ MB/s. Not bad, certainly better than a regular NAS. I was happy, but because this still was going to take a while, I let this run overnight. I got up in the morning, only to find an error message: disk full, continue, abort?

Disk full?? How could this be? I still has more than 600 GB of free space left on the server according to the WHS console. I clicked continue and the copying process happily continued. Strange. Why did this error message pop up in the first place then? After a quite a few movies were copied, another strange thing happened: my network speed dropped immensely. And I DO mean immensely. Something from 60-70 MB/s to less than 1 MB/s! Just like that! I had no idea what was going on, but then I started to do my homework, and came across some online articles which explained it to me. I was also the victim of Drive Extender, or at least of how the technology works.

During the copy, the 250 GB (OS disk) disk filled up. Once it was almost full, Drive Extender kicked in, effectively almost annihilating my transfer speeds. Needless to say, I was and am not happy about this!

But that's simply how it works: if you want to add a file to your server, you copy it to a share. In the background, this file gets copied to the C: drive (OS drive). After the copy is finished, Drive Extender kicks in and starts moving the file to its place in the storage pool. Once this Drive Extender kicks in, you'll see immense speed drops on the server, so that's not good. Drive Extender also usually waits until the copy is finished until it kicks in, unless the landing zone runs out of space: then it kicks in immediately, and brings the network speed to an absolute crawl with it. This is what I saw was happening to my server...

The best was still to come though. I had copied a lot of files to the \\server\videos share. I also copied a lot of them to the \\server\music share, because I knew there would be duplicates. That way, I intended to remove the duplicates by hand from the music share and copy the rest to the videos share. And that's where's the sh*t really started to hit the fan. Every movie I tried to copy took on average between TEN and FIFTEEN minutes. If you know I have a few hundred movies to copy like that, that is simply not workable. This was only because Drive Extender forced the movie to be copied from the drive pool back to the OS drive, and then back again to where it needed to be. A process, which on a 'regular' server, RAID or no raid, would take mere seconds!

If I had known this beforehand I would have NEVER started with WHS. The nature of what I intend to do with my server dictates that I'll ALWAYS be working with large files, so this will ALWAYS be an issue for me. This is simply not acceptable. I wished I had gone with a regular Windows 2003 setup which at least offer the possibility to use regular RAID arrays, and not this Drive Extender nonsense. Or I could have gone with Ubuntu Linux server combined with Samba, which would have cost me absolutely nothing, with the exception of a bit of time because the learning curve is more steep and I'm no Linux guru.

As said before, everybody will run into this, if not only for the way they market WHS. They say: "Oh, you can use a small older drive for your OS drive, 80 GB is sufficient." WRONG! Since it's the 'landing zone' for any copied file, AND it's used as some sort of 'buffer disk/workspace' for every file in the storage pool, this should be the fastest drive in your system! If anything, pick a WD raptor! But it still would end up being dog slog compared to a regular RAID array when working with large files.

Some have advised to use a drive of at least the same speed and size for the OS drive is being used for the storage drives. In my case this would be a 750 Samsung drive. Only to be used for a 20 GB OS partition and a landing zone for copied files? I'm sorry , but that's asking too much! A 750 GB drive simply as a buffer only to overcome the downsides of Drive Extender? That's ridiculous! If you ask me, this is a serious design flaw!

I wished they had given me the option to setup WHS with a regular RAID array, and leave this drive extender nonsense where it should be: uninstalled. But they didn't. A true shame, because WHS also has it's merits: it's really very easy to use, the backup facility is awesome eg. But it also has a few quirks, Drive Extender being the worst of them, but also eg. the lack of an onboard FTP server. Because of the nature of how WHS's file system works, (storage pool, with no drive letters), this simply does not work with regular FTP programs. Instead of coming up with a fix for that, Microsoft simply decided to give FTP the boot entirely. I mean come on! Which server does not support FTP out of the box? I know I can install one myself, but that's not the point. The point is when I'd do that, it would probably muck up the entire file system in no time, because FTP'ing would jump over the filesystem's head, creating havock.
But still, I believe FTP is such a standard protocol, it's like buying a car without wheels. It simply should be there, no question about it.

So what am I going to do now? Honestly: I don't know. Try 2003 server? Maybe... Try Linux? Tssss.... I can always use FreeNAS, or NASLite... maybe even OpenFiler or Open-E, those are supposed to be pretty good... Or maybe sell the whole server PC and buy a regular NAS instead. Synology has a very nice model coming up... I don't know anymore, I'm truly in limbo here.

But most of all I feel cheated. Cheated by Microsoft, but most of all but all those 'reviewers' who never discovered this issue, or,if they had, decided to leave it out of their review. From all I read, and I read dozens of reviews, WHS was the best product since sliced bread. Not ONE word of comment (except maybe the review of Tim Higgins from SmallNetBuilder.com, but he didn't like it for other reasons - lack of protocols, no print server, no backup of the server, ...he received a lot of bad comments by all those MS fanboys because of it as well!) about how bad Drive Extender can be...

In short: WHS is a good OS... as long as you only install ONE drive in your system. Once you install a second drive and Drive Extender kicks in and takes over, you're toast.