–December 14, 2005 @ 19:17–
RAID is too hard. People want their stuff to be backed up and not fail, but right now nobody does it. It would be really great if RAID were easy to set up and didn’t incur such a large startup cost, but right now it is unusable for me due to the initial expense, and for everyone else due to the PITA factor.
The solution that everyone secretly wants is to just throw a bunch of hard drives in the computer and then have them all magically work and back each other up. Right now, upgrading hard drives is the most painful upgrade out there. We could eliminate a lot of the pain if we did a RAID thing that didn’t require all the disks to be the same size. The HD daemon would fire up on bootup, find a new hardrive, and then include it as spare space in its managed area. Then, if one of the drives dies, all the data is safe and the HD manager would issue an alert. This could be fixed by pulling the drive and throwing in a new one of equal or greater size.
All the math involved is known and sensible. The only issue is that there are many configurations that would make it impossible to back up data – if there were only 2 hard drives and their sizes were different, then there is the issue about the what to do about the unbackuppable difference. But over time as people buy more and more storage, this problem should go away.
Let’s take the idea of RAID to the next level – a Huge Array of Different Drives. We have all the pieces, but nobody has put them together. There’s money and fame waiting for someone who does…
Update! — August 9, 2007
It’s here! And it’s called Drobo! If you have a lot of data, then you want one of these SO BADLY and you didn’t even know it until right now.
