Microsoft has announced that the next major version of the software, codenamed "Vail," will do away with one of its most user-friendly feature, the drive extender.

The drive feature allows users take multiple hard drives and pool them all together to add to a total amount of storage. It is really handy for those who have a lot of old hard-drives kicking around or want to expand the storage on a computer without having to mess with special third-party software However according to the Windows Home Server blog, users really hate the software and so it is being removed from beta versions of WHS, Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials beginning early next year.

Apparently the problem is that hard drive size has increased to the point where 1-terabyte-or-higher hard drives can be had on the cheap so no one wants to wire up old hard-drives any more. Michael Leworthy, Micosoft's Windows Server senior technical product manager, said that when weighing up the future direction of storage in the consumer and SMB market, the team felt the Drive Extender technology was not meeting our customer needs.