By Philip Churchill on July 10th, 2012
Why Did WHS Fail?
ServeTheHome gives their take on why Windows Home Server failed.
“Recently Microsoft announced that Windows Home Server will not see another version and is effectively discontinued. I actually think this makes a lot of sense, as I always felt that once the new drive extender technology was removed from Windows Home Server 2011 the product line was essentially doomed.”
Giving their 9 reasons for it’s failings, its an interesting perspective which you can find here.
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My view on the failure of MHS, We have a simple setup, my wife and I have a computer each, both used for a mix of work and social, and we share some documents along with all our music, don’t really use it for video.
For several years I have run MHS 1 (2003 server base) with 4Tb of storage as my wife is a photographer. it’s simple, sits in the garage and does it’s job…
Recently I upgraded my wifes PC, and figured I would use the old one for a basis of a server upgrade / refresh it’s been spinning those disks for a lot of hours now!
So I bought MHS2011….. Bad move, the best thing about MHS was it was very affordable for backup and simple sharing using basic hardware well… forget performance, there are only two users! but to achieve the same function from WHS 2011 I would need a proper RAID system, big money for a garage server! the software simulated mirroring on WHS 1 worked very well for our needs, The ability to bung another disk on when one was available was also great news.
BUT I had the new hardware and I bought the software so I installed MHS2011, it looks good on the surface, but software raid didn’t build my 4 2Tb drives, it’s just not up to the job, but I gave it a go… got to 60% after 4 days then a windows update caused a reboot and it started again! that make added unreliability! configured the remote access (Dlink 655 router) and it worked first time… for about 30 minutes then it lost connection to the router and subsequently has a security certificate error show up. Manually configured the router same thing happened… works for s short time only so working away from home is possible as long as you are at home to re-run the remote connection software…
1 week into the install I am giving up and putting the old copy of WHS 1 on the new hardware, this is supposed to be a simple system for simple use! thats what I had before, the 2011 system requires server hardware and management, which is not what I want in my garage! if I did then I would go for small business server instead.
Please Microsoft give us a product that is simple, cheap and works! this is home computing not enterprise level!
WHS didn’t fail as much as it is just being replaced with cloud services. Name anything that the WHS does out of the box (add-ins are limitless) and I’d bet big money that MS will offer that feature in the cloud to consumers within the next 12 months.
Well, Microsoft may offer their cloud services attempting to replace WHS, but to me they’re going to be as much use as a chocolate teapot.
I live in the countryside at the end of a piece of wet string. Using the cloud to store/stream large amounts of personal data is neither affordable nor practical.
The WHS concept fills a very useful niche. It’s a pity that Microsoft has failed miserably to do anything with it.
Microsoft, Google, and others, all believe that everyone wants to trust the “cloud”.
However,
The “cloud” is very expensive;
The “cloud” can disappear – e.g. MegaUpload.
I agree with Geoff, Cloud is fine for small amounts of data gives high availability to those that are on the move city to city.
We almost never want any data from home when not here, the 100Gb of music we have between us is great to have at home, on the road I have whats on my iPhone, don’t need any more… the several terabytes of photographs are a key reason for a server storage system, they are NEVER needed outside the house. So why should we use the cloud? a mirror with backups is just fine for us thanks, and we want to use the machine that we are upgrading our desktop FROM as the server so not to heavy on overhead, and good for about 4 years or so before the next piece of hardware becomes available.
I could probably do it with Windows 8, or other microsoft products, can do it just as well on Linux… but I like MHS as long as it works on second hand hardware for a server and is easy to setup and use, it would sell IF marketed!
The “cloud” is just someone elses computer. Why would I want to store my data on someone elses computer?
Like Pete said, I think getting rid of disk expander from whs 1 killed it. Who knows, perhaps it was dieing already from MSFT perspective. But when I upgraded to whs2011 i was sooo disappointed. What a POS trying to have to manage disk space. Darn thing would not even let you spread backups on different disks to compensate for the removal of expander. I have a 2GB drive at capacity and another one virtual empty.