RAID's Days May Be Numbered

storagedude sends in an article claiming that RAID is nearing the end of the line because of soaring rebuild times and the growing risk of data loss. "The concept of parity-based RAID (levels 3, 5 and 6) is now pretty old in technological terms, and the technology's limitations will become pretty clear in the not-too-distant future — and are probably obvious to some users already. In my opinion, RAID-6 is a reliability Band Aid for RAID-5, and going from one parity drive to two is simply delaying the inevitable. The bottom line is this: Disk density has increased far more than performance and hard error rates haven't changed much, creating much greater RAID rebuild times and a much higher risk of data loss. In short, it's a scenario that will eventually require a solution, if not a whole new way of storing and protecting data."

Comments

Re:Worked-around a Long Time Ago

[Fred_A]

I shouldn't need to use 12 separate disks spread across the globe just for basic reliability / redundancy

You're trying to weasel out of paying IBM protection money !

Look the solution is obvious

[jayhawk88]

The cloud. Just cloud it, baby. Nothing bad ever happens in the cloud; they're so white and fluffy after all.

Re:Worked-around a Long Time Ago

[kickedfortrolling]

Don't discourage the boy. Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals

Re:Worked-around a Long Time Ago

[yahwotqa]

Not from weasels, though...