Well having spent a number of weeks with Windows 8 RTM… my first question is, WTF? This is design gone mad. The constant switching between the desktop and the “Windows 8 start menu” i.e. Metro start menu, is incredibly jarring. So much so that I relented and came up with a start button hack. I wonder if anyone at Microsoft has tried this 😉
Some good news though regarding Windows 8’s Storage Spaces (at least we think its good news), our testing shows that Drive Bender is still king when it comes to performance. Again we see software RAID falling in a heap, why companies persist with this is mind boggling… were Microsoft paying attention when Data Core’s Drive Harmony hit users? On a test machine here, it used 1GB of RAM (not joking) and had the performance of a wet sock! Anyway, point being that it did not get much further than the initial beta test. Why? Because software RAID is slow, and if it breaks you cannot simply mount a drive and take a peek at the contents.
Now… some would argue that file duplication is inefficient with regards to storage usage, however in a world where storage is cheap and performance is not, this in our minds is the smarter trade off. And judging by the emails we are getting about Drive Bender’s compatibility with Windows 8 (you can read more on that here), I’m guessing we are not alone.
Finally though I would like to say “congrates” to Microsoft on their efforts with Server 2012… this is an excellent piece of software (Storage Spaces aside). The server management stuff is absolute brilliant, and it boots straight into the desktop… what a novel concept!