WHS 2011 Add-In Update : Drive Bender Tomcat Beta 2

Drive Bender, the add-in for Windows Home Sever 2011 that replaces Drive Extender, has a beta for it’s forthcoming Tomcat release taking it to version 1.2.3.5.

What is it?

Drive Bender is state of the art, single point storage pool technology for Microsoft Windows. Drive Bender presents multiple hard drives as a single pool of data storage, either as one or more drive letters, or a network shared drive. Drive Bender is able to do this with any drive recognized by Windows, including external drive such as USB, Firewire etc.

Expandability

Drive Bender also provides the user with the ability to seamless expand their storage pool by simply adding a new drive. Adding a new drive expands the pool by the size of the new drive. Existing data within the pool is redistributed to the new drive to ensure the pool remain balanced.

Drive merging and converting

Drive Bender also offers a merge capability, allowing users to take a drive that contains data, and merge that drive (and data) into the pool. In addition there is also a drive conversion feature. This can take and existing drive letter (mounted against a physical drive) and convert this into a pooled drive. Once completed, new hard drives can be added to expand the once fixed drive.

Data redundancy

To further ensure data safety, Drive Bender can automatically duplicate any file added to a Drive Bender pool. File duplication is determined at the folder level and occurs on the fly as data is being written to the pool. More importantly, files are only duplicated across physical drives ensuring maximum safety and data redundancy.

Non-destructive

One of the key Drive Bender features is its non-destructive file system technology. In short, this means that all drives within a Drive Bender pool are utilizing standard NTFS format and file structures. This is to such an extent that a drive can be pulled from the pool and read on any machine capable of reading an NTFS formatted drive. More over, drives attached to the pool can be done so without modification, if a drive is added (not merged) that contains existing data, that data will remain untouched.

Ease to try

Because of our non-destructive file system, taking Drive Bender for a test drive is easy. Simply specify the drives to be included in the pool, and you are ready go. The drives are not formatted (unless specified), the only change made to the drive is the addition of a folder that holds the contents of the pool and a small number of configuration files.

The technology

Drive Bender employs existing, proven kernel mode file system technology. Having spent many years developing kernel mode drivers, we are able to use this experience to great extent. The end result is a product whose performance will closely match that of the underlying drive.

The story

Early in 2010 we prototyped a Drive Extender style application with the view of releasing a product that would work with all versions of Microsoft Windows. However soon thereafter, Microsoft announced Vail (a new version of Windows Home Server) and a small business server product, codename Aurora, both of which contain their Drive Extender technology. Given this, and the possibility that Drive Extend may well make its way to other Microsoft platforms, we shelved the project.

However later that same year, Microsoft announced that they would be dropping Drive Extender from all their products (including Windows Home Server 2011), leaving the door open for Division-M to resurrect the Drive Bender project!

Release v1.2.3.5 beta (2012-01-14)

- Bug fix: The pool could lockup under certain conditions (issue is caused by the named (alternate) stream support previously introduced, as a result this has been removed for the time being).
- Bug fix: BSOD could occur on systems running MSE.
- Update: The health monitor has been improved and now sleeps after each scan (currently this sleep time is 96 hours).
- Update: The pool file count meta-data is now persisted across reboots.
- Update: Client / server security has been introduced. This feature uses the Windows authentication system.
- Update: Client / server networking is now fully encrypted using AES.
- Update: Folder time stamping has been improved and now works as per the NTFS spec.

Download the Windows version
Download the WHS version
Download the client version

Important notes regarding this beta.
1) To install on a system running v1.2.2.2 (or earlier), simply install over the top of the existing installation.
2) If you experience an issues with this beta and wish to go back to v1.2.2.2, you are able to install v1.2.2.2 straight over the top of this beta.