Looks like third party software companies have been busy in the wake of Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) announcement last year that it will be dropping its drive extender feature in the 2011 family of Windows server. Drive extender allows hard disk drives of disparate capacities to be aggregated into a single volume, and is one of the linchpin features leveraged by power users of Windows Home Server. Microsoft cited the commodity of large capacity hard drives for the removal of drive extender, though it proved little comfort to a number of upset users.

As reported by CNET however, at least three companies have been working on add-ins that bring back similar functionality to Windows. Drive Bender from Division M entered beta just this week, and purports to work with all versions of Windows starting from Windows XP and above. StableBit Drive Pool is in alpha at the moment and because it works as an add-in WHS 2011 allows for similar user interaction. Finally, a third option called Storage Virtualization from DataCore is part of a large suite of storage solutions geared towards WHS and Windows Small Business Server, and is scheduled to arrive at a later date.

Are you an existing user of drive extender? I would love to hear how it has made storage management easier for you.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at CNET News

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