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… Oh well, we ask that question enough anyway…

Here are the details and press release:

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.