We’re into the second week of the Disk Management 1.1 release, and we’ve had lots of positive feedback so far.
Here’s a selection of reviews and release announcements:
UsingWindowsHomeServer.com
Tentacle Software announced the release of their updated Disk Management Add-In this weekend and I spent an evening in “hard drive information overload” as I reviewed this sweet update to an already cool tool!
Is this Add-In for me? Heck yeah. My parents? Not so much. This Add-In is well worth the $10 for any avid WHS user. Access to the disk temperatures, serial numbers and drive models are worth the money in time-savings alone.
tech-n-life.com
The Most Essential WHS Add In: Disk Management 1.1 for Windows Home Server
I have been beta testing an add in for my Windows Home Server for what feels like ever!!! It’s an essential tool in managing your disks in Windows Home Server. It has seamless integration with WHS. When it is installed, you wonder how could Microsoft possible have left these features out of a server…
WeGotServed.com
Disk Management for Windows Home Server was probably one of the first add-ins I installed for WHS, and is one of those must-have add-ins for WHS.
The great thing is that you get a chance to support your favorite add-in without costing you an arm or a leg. Hell, I can spend $10 in one day getting my caffeine-laden soda fix!
HomeServerLand.com
Sam Wood of Tentacle Software, curator of one of the most popular Windows Home Server add-ins announces a feature-loaded updated version of his Disk Management add-in.
MediaSmartServer.net
The new version has been significantly overhauled with an updated interface, better performance, and a number of new features which are listed below in the official announcement.
I’ve been fortunate to participate in the beta testing of the 1.1 version, and if you found the previous free version to be valuable I’m sure you’ll appreciate the updates included in this new release.
MS Windows Home Server
The Disk Management add-in from fellow MVP Sam Wood is designed for users who need more detail about their server’s storage status than what the standard Server Storage interface provides. It’s also the 1st add-in I install on a Windows Home Server box and the good news is that a new version is finally available with lots of new features.
Over at the Ignition Development blog, I’ve posted an article on the development of the content management and online store framework that runs Tentacle Software.
The old Tentacle Software website wasn’t a looker by anyone’s standards; it functioned, in that it served HTML pages with text and links, but it was by no means a stunning piece of architecture. In fact, it was just a couple of raw HTML pages and some JavaScript.
Foundation
In the run-up to launching Disk Management, we redesigned the site using a free CSS template and switched to Ignition Development’s Site Foundation Framework for content management and shopping functionality. Why SFF? Well, you can’t run a successful store on a crap CMS, and I helped write SFF so I know it’s awesome.
I’m planning to do a few posts like this, describing the infrastructure I built to get Tentacle Software off the ground. Should be interesting for anyone trying to get their own business started.
This isn't a WHS-related post, but I'm throwing this out to Google as a vote for a specific solution to a specific problem. If you're trying to copy some really large files from an OSX user, ones that don't fit on a FAT32 volume, use HSFExplorer.
To transfer large files from an OSX machine to Windows, if you don’t want to mess around with Bootcamp drivers:
- Copy large files from the OSX machine to an HSF-formatted USB disk
- Plug USB disk into your Windows machine
- Run HSFExplorer and locate the HSF volume
- Right-click the files you want and choose ‘Extract’
Works just like any archive unpacker (WinRAR etc). Highly recommended.
Tentacle Software is proud to announce the release of Disk Management 1.1, the next version of our very popular Windows Home Server Add-In. It has, as they say, been a long time coming.
We’ve kept this release under the radar, for the most part. We’ve talked about it in hushed whispers (through various threads on We Got Served, and teaser posts here) for at least a year and a half. Why did it take so long? We really, really wanted to get it right.
New Features
We re-architected the entire Add-In to use a Windows Service to do all the back-end heavy lifting. That’s given us the flexibility to add a bunch of functionality that you’ve all been asking for.
Everyone loves bullet points, so here are our new shinies in no particular order:
- Significantly improved user interface (including a collapsible pane for the wireframe if you don’t use it)
- Significantly improved performance, especially on multi-core CPUs
- Charts for disk space statistics
- Charts for disk space utilisation over time
- Disk statistics logging to a file
- More disk details, including the NTFS mount point for each disk
- Real counting of the actual backup database size (for all you crazy kids with backup duplication enabled)
- A detailed help file
The new UI is something we’re really proud of. No more pop-up windows to see detailed information about your disks, it’s all there in one display.
New Price
The other major change is that we’re going professional. Disk Management will no longer be free.
There are a number of reasons for us to do this, but mostly we believe that Disk Management is worth paying for, and moving to a paid model will help ensure that Disk Management is supported and maintained in the future.
Disk Management is available as a free 30-day trial, with no feature or functionality limitations. You can try it out with no risk and see how awesome the new version is. If you love it as much as we do, a license for v1.x will cost you US$10 per server.
New Website
The Tentacle Software website has had a major facelift. We’ve got a whole new style, and a new store. Have a look and tell us what you think; we would love to hear your feedback.
The Future
We’re very excited about this release, as I’m sure you can tell. We believe that Disk Management 1.1 is the start of something special for us, and we’ve got plans for all sorts of goodies for Windows Home Server that I’m sure you’ll love.
We want to sincerely thank all our beta testers, and everyone who has given us feedback. Disk Management and Tentacle Software are two years old and we couldn’t have made it this far without you.
We’re in the process of changing the Disk Management and Tentacle Blog sites over to a new web server. DNS takes time to replicate, so you might notice a few broken images and links for the next 24-48 hours.