Is there a need for RAID in the home, or am I just a guy with a hammer looking for a nail? Probably the fact that I’m even asking that question means that I missed the point. The home doesn’t need RAID. The home needs solutions.

It seems that the more important questions are:

what data is in the home?
how is it used?
where is it?
how can it fail?
what happens if it fails?

Maybe once we answer those questions we’ll know whether the home should contain a hammer, er, RAID.

First, lets all agree that we’re talking about data on disks – not memory sticks, PDAs or XBox memory cards. They may all have valid data, but given their storage size they’re not where the bulk of the home data will reside.

Next, is that storage accessible to the home user? In other words, can you add or replace drives? If you can’t get to the drives, then you can’t replace the bad drive. Then again, not being able to replace bad drives is maybe a reason to have RAID. Hmm.

What sort of data is being stored? If it’s pictures and videos on your home computer then I can guarantee that you’re family will beat you senseless if you lose them. But if it’s just yesterday’s Oprah on your DVR then you’re probably safe. Worse case you can just use bit torrent software to download a new copy [within the legal limits of the law].

Use of an offsite backup also comes into play. There are plenty of services like XDrive that will allow you to move your data to and from an X: drive (thus the name). Of course this only protects you if you’re willing to pay for enough X: space and whether you’ve recently backed up your data to X:. There are windows of time where a drive could fail before the data was backed up.

So it seems that a need for protecting data against drive failure is important for the home. Now we just need to understand how we get that protection, whether it looks like today’s RAID or something new/different/better.

We’ll talk about that in tomorrow’s post.

TT

This entry was posted on Friday, September 29th, 2006 and is filed under Storage Interconnects & RAID, Advisor - Tom Treadway. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.