So I've played with Windows Home Server and it has a lot of potential especially in regard to giving any user data protection from hard drive failures. A hard drive crash can ruin any ones day/week/month/year and to have a safety net for your data that doesn't require significant expense or knowledge is great.
But where I think its week is in providing other features that make it a server and not just a network-attached storage device. I know that there are Add-Ins and that there is quite a community building for that but Microsoft makes server products for everything from email to patch management to anti virus to media streaming. Somehow they need to adapt these kinds of things or you might as well just buy a Drobo.
I also think that hardware OEMs are missing the mark for these units. To me the single significant feature of this product is the ability to create an easily expandable yet reliable data store. The 2 and 4 bay units are probably going to be the mainstream seller and I understand that they'll probably sell a lot more units at $400 to $700 but I have yet to see the 'premium' unit. Something with 8 or 12 bays. If I can continuously add drives to my server instead of needing to replace one how much more valuable does each drive become. I can then use any drive I purchase for its entire functional life. Maybe a 100GB drive isn't huge in a world of 500GB and 1TB drives but if the drive runs and all I need to do is at it to my pool of drives then it still has value.
