LaCie announces USB-C 2big RAID & 8-terabyte Rugged RAID Shuttle

I have set up and worked with RAID in the past. But the average consumer doesn't care about RAID and therefore won't buy it. What some company needs to do, if they want to sell their product, is innovate. Specifically, someone needs to invent a drive that changes its own RAID configuration automatically depending upon how the data is accessed and how much data there is. For example, if less than 10% of the drive's space is being used, it should implement mirroring. If certain files are being accessed a lot it should implement striping. (And perhaps even a simultaneous mix of striping and mirroring.) And it should dynamically change as the user's needs change. In a way Apple's Fusion drive technology is already a step in this direction: files are moved between HDD and SSD as the drive sees fit, without knowledge of the user. This synthesis approach ("SynDrive" - I just coined that word, and a Google search indicates that word is not used much) should work on either HDD or SSD memory devices. For SynHDDs you probably require multiple HDDs and for SynSSDs you probably require multiple SSDs or you may not be gaining very much. I think either the OS or the physical device could handle the details, but it's more likely in the OS because device manufacturers historically don't write much software. I hope we see this innovation before I die. Oh, here's another good name for this innovation: BlenDrive. P.S. There needs to be two separate cables going into the BlenDrive to allow for redundancy in the physical drive controllers. And in the spirit of the round pizza box by Apple, the new Apple SynHDD should be cylindrical because HDD disk platters are circular.  :) 

Well I use Raid 1 disk mirroring at home, but I’m looking now at replacing my ‘spinning rust’ HDDs with SSDs. SanDisk have decent Terabyte portables that use USB 3.1 Gen 2 bandwidth and the new Samsung Thunderbolt 3 drive is almost as fast as a Mac’s internal SSD!

Every Lacie drive I have ever purchased (four) in the past failed. I always unmount before disconnecting or powering off. Every other drive I have purchased from every other maker has not. I am not sure what their failure rates are these days?

Raid 0 and Raid 1 seem merely marketing designations -- not the kinds of Raid a pro would need. 

22july2013 said:

I have set up and worked with RAID in the past. But the average consumer doesn't care about RAID and therefore won't buy it. What some company needs to do, if they want to sell their product, is innovate. Specifically, someone needs to invent a drive that changes its own RAID configuration automatically depending upon how the data is accessed and how much data there is. For example, if less than 10% of the drive's space is being used, it should implement mirroring. If certain files are being accessed a lot it should implement striping. (And perhaps even a simultaneous mix of striping and mirroring.) And it should dynamically change as the user's needs change. In a way Apple's Fusion drive technology is already a step in this direction: files are moved between HDD and SSD as the drive sees fit, without knowledge of the user. This synthesis approach ("SynDrive" - I just coined that word, and a Google search indicates that word is not used much) should work on either HDD or SSD memory devices. For SynHDDs you probably require multiple HDDs and for SynSSDs you probably require multiple SSDs or you may not be gaining very much. I think either the OS or the physical device could handle the details, but it's more likely in the OS because device manufacturers historically don't write much software. I hope we see this innovation before I die. Oh, here's another good name for this innovation: BlenDrive. P.S. There needs to be two separate cables going into the BlenDrive to allow for redundancy in the physical drive controllers. And in the spirit of the round pizza box by Apple, the new Apple SynHDD should be cylindrical because HDD disk platters are circular.  :) 

The average consumer is really no different than an IT solution architect - each one buys systems that meet their predominant requirements and satisfy their purposeful objectives. For many consumers fault tolerance, hot swapping storage volumes, reducing data access latencies in millisecond time frames, and automatic error detection and correction at bit and byte level aren’t even part of the conversation. Hiding or disguising a purpose driven design strategy, as the different flavors of RAID provide, in a consumer product that has no demand for such capabilities could be a waste of resources, time, and incur additional costs without delivering additional value.  

Apple's Fusion (hybrid) design is a very traditional caching strategy. All caching strategies are based on a statistically affirmed knowledge of how data is referenced by running programs in time and/or space and where a natural bottleneck exists, which for nearly all computing platforms based on Von Neumann architecture is memory, backing storage, and caching hierarchies. In other words, programs tend to make multiple memory requests for data that was recently requested and/or memory locations adjacent to ones that have already been referenced. This is a very different strategy than what is driving the design of RAID systems.

I understand the notion of adaptive processing, say what you’d implement for load balancing, elasticity, scalability, etc. But again, if that’s the purposeful objective that’s driving the design strategy why mix in a design like RAID that was driven an entirely different purpose, much less two different types of RAID that serve two different purposes? Dynamically reconfiguring a storage element on the fly from one RAID strategy whose purpose is performance to another RAID strategy whose purpose is fault tolerance based on data access patterns or storage demand would be very confusing to say the least. At what point would the user or client know that the underlying rules of the game were changed - whether they like the change or not? As a client or consumer I always want to know that the contract that I signed up for is adhered to in a deterministic manner over the life of the contract. Every RAID strategy comes with an implied “contract” between client and provider.