Consumer RAID?
This may already be out there, but if it does, I haven't run across it yet.

Last night I was thinking that we needed a new hard drive at home for our pictures and home movies. I was thinking of getting a hundred Gig or two, but was concerned that if we just used one drive for everything (as we currently do) then we leave ourselves open for having one disaster wiping out all of our history.

Of course we could archive to CD or DVD, but the regular maintenance is more work than I care to do over the long run.

Then it occurred to me that what is needed is a consumer oriented RAID device. With simple mirroring, all of your data would be backed up constantly. If one drive went out, you could replace it without losing everything, and without having to copy things around.

It wouldn't have to be a high-performance setup, or, for me anyway, necessarily a high capacity set up, so the cost of this security of mind would be a bit of extra hardware and another drive. Probably less that $100 all in for a new-to-market product.

Seems like a good idea for all the reasons it's a good idea in server environments; especially when home computers have moved to being a media hub for the house and are always on.

Thoughts?

Update: Here's an article from earlier this month from the Register talking about pretty much the same thing. Apparently it's in the air.


- posted @ 1:11 PM