Everyone seems upset by the non-inclusion of Media Center in Vail. There is another “limitation” in the Vail Beta that has concerned more than just a few WHS enthusiasts. Testers have reported that Vail Preview will only support connection of 10 hard drives.
A 10 drive limit in Vail?
Based on the 2nd reply to this post by Bulat Shelepov, Test Lead (Drive Extender), Windows Home and Small Business Server Team, and repeated in our own forums the 10 drive is a limitation only in the Vail Beta. From Bulat:
14 shouldn’t be a problem in most cases. We don’t prevent the user from adding more than 10 drives, it’s just not stable enough in this beta release. We’re testing on machines with more than 10 disks at the moment and are seeing occasional bugs, which we need to fix before raising our official limits. The number of disks is less important than the combined capacity of all disks though.
It is also interesting to note in Terry’s post about Mark Vayman’s comments on Drive Extender v2 technology indicates the real current Beta limit may actually be 16 drives: Per Mark:
Internally, the “Vail” software has been tested with up to 16 hard drives and with up to 16 TB of total storage capacity. We’re aware of a number of bugs that occur beyond these limits, so please keep your beta installations under 16 drives and 16 TB total drive space.
If you have one those Monster Norco 4220’s, hang tight. The limit will increase. As Bulat states, the combined capacity of the drives may end up being more of a limitation then the actual quantity of drives.
