Drive Bender presents multiple hard drives as a single pool of storage, either as one or more drive letters, or a network shared drive. Feel free to submit any test scenarios you might be curious about and I’ll try to test those and we’ll see how Drive Bender handles it.ĭrive Bender is state of the art, single point storage pool technology for Microsoft Windows. This review of Drive Bender is going to document my experience installing the program, copying approximately 10TB of data to the new pool of drive (16TB)s, merging a drive with data on it into the pool WITHOUT ERASING THE DATA, working with duplication, destroying the pool and seeing if the data stays intact, and anything else you can think of to test it out. It does have an Add-In interface for the Dashboard where you can control many, but not all, of it’s functions. Please note I called this a program and not an Add-In since it runs as a program in WHS 2011. Now there is at least one alternative to Drive Extender available for purchase called Drive Bender. For some people this means that Drive Bender could either be “the savior for WHS 2011″ or possibly a “doomsday for your data”. In my readings of some of the forums, many people have used a software RAID but seem to bash a DE replacement.

Honestly I’m not sure why people are as negative as they are about a 3rd party creating this. The lack of DE certainly has slowed the adoption of WHS 2011 by increasing the complexity for many users who would like to upgrade but can’t as there isn’t a cost effective storage solution for them. In extensive reading of blog comments and forum discussions, I’ve noticed a strong skepticism regarding the lack of DE for WHS 2011 and the viability of a 3rd party DE replacement. In addition, there was a type of software RAID that duplicated files in case a hard drive failed.

If you had 2-500gb hard drives and 2 -1TB drives, Drive Extender would pool them together so it looked like 1-3TB drive. Drive Extender allows users to use any size hard drive (JBOD-Just A Bunch Of Drives) in their system and consolidate them so it looked like a single drive. With Windows Home Server 2011 out and running, the biggest complaint most users have is the lack of Drive Extender (DE) being incorporated into the operating system, which was included in WHS v.1.

Windows home server 2011 pricing