Let me tell you how mass storage should work: I stick in a new disk, power on the machine, and then the new disk is there waiting to be written to, having been identified as new and then joined into a storage cluster in which a group of non-identical disks mutually back each other up. In the event of hardware failure, I would purchase a new disk of equal or greater size to replace the failed one, and then, on bootup, that new disk would transparently take the place of the old one, although with perhaps even more space. The math for doing this is easy, but somehow the will isn’t there.
I have two hard drives in my desktop machine, and have decided to wipe my windows partition and use the two disks to back each other up. This halves my storage space but more than doubles my peace of mind, which is what I am trying to optimize anyway. Unfortunately, to do this I have to dive into totally stupid crap like bizarre mdadm commands and mkfs with bizarre options and no how-to. The fact that I need a how-to is unacceptable, but the fact that one doesn’t even exist is just dumb. And even should I eventually get it all set up, if one of the drives dies, I will not be able to replace it with anything except a drive of the exact same size. If I add another drive, things get harder and more annoying, and if I add even more drives, things became so abstruse and painful that I don’t even want to imagine it.
This sucks. Hey Linux people! I will totally use any mass storage solution which can easily support the addition and replacement of hard drives, and I don’t think I am alone here. I suck at this stuff – you don’t want me writing this code – but I will make it if I have to. I just really don’t want to have to.
OSX! Why isn’t this in there already? Windows! This is your chance to beat OSX in usability! Grab it with both hands!
It’s 2010 and mass storage is pretty much still stuck in the 80s.*
* Journaling filesystems only barely excepted – they can be stuck in the early 90s.
