Windows Home Server Still Dogged by Data Corruption Issues

Over two months after data corruption issues first surfaced in Microsoft's Windows Home Server, the issue is still unresolved. It appears the problem is much larger than Microsoft originally thought.

Microsoft marketed the product as a consumer storage solution for everyday home users, as part of Microsoft's next generation of Windows products. We know how well Windows Vista is doing, and Windows Home Server is doing worse, as a file server that corrupts data is no use at all.

I first wrote about this issue in late December. Since then, Microsoft released an update to the issue, but still said the issue was isolated to only a few programs: seven at that time. There are now nine confirmed programs exhibiting issues, including:

• Windows Vista Photo Gallery
• Windows Live Photo Gallery
• Microsoft Office OneNote 2007
• Microsoft Office OneNote 2003
• Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
• Microsoft Money 2007
• SyncToy 2.0 Beta
• Intuit Quickbooks
• uTorrent

Quickbooks and uTorrent had been previously reported by users, but unconfirmed by Microsoft. This would lead one to the assumption that the other 14 unconfirmed programs in the list are probably having real issues as well. Naturally Microsoft adds, "You may also experience this issue when you use other programs that are not listed here."

Some pretty significant programs are in the list of those that are "unconfirmed." Some of them (more at Microsoft's support article) are:

• Photoshop Elements
• Zune Software
• Apple iTunes
• Adobe Lightroom
• Intuit Quicken
• MS Digital Image Library
  
• ACDSee
• WinAmp
• Microsoft Office Excel

Here's my recommendation: skip Windows Home Server. Get yourself a good Network Attacked Storage device (NAS). If you read reviews (and please, do so), you can get yourself a pretty decent one for not too much. For example, this Lacie drive is 1TB and less than $300 (right now) at Amazon.com.

From a global warming perspective, think of how much less power a NAS takes than a server, also.