A RAID, as most people know, is a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. The idea is simple: Use more Hard Drives to A) Increase Storage, B) Keep redundant copies of information, C) Increase Performance, or D) Do many/all of the forementioned.

So, here's my suggestion: Take the Raid idea and bring it to a single disk.

The number 1 reason for a major harddrive failure is a head crash. Luckialy, these don't happen very often, but when they do, all your data can be lost. My suggestion is to do what raid does, except instead of independant Disks, I'm thinking independant Platers. I guess that would make this a RAIP. (A very bad acronym... must find something more appropiate.)

Say a Harddrive manufacturer sells a harddrive that has 4 platters. Using jumpers, the drive will work in one of the following ways: No Raid (The drive acts normally). Mirror Raid (The drive splits its' platers in half, performing a Raid 1; Storage space is halved). Parity Raid (The drive performs a Raid 5 style raid across all the platers; Space on harddrive would be reduced by deviding the total space by the number of platters, adding them together minus one platter's worth of storage; Performance would be reduced due to increased head seeks).

If/when the harddrive detects a failure, it would report it to the system using the existing SMART drive monitoring system.

The Drive would appear to the system as a standard single drive, requireing no special drivers of any kind.

Pros: Easy to use and effective solution to prevent a single point of failure. Would allow laptops to gain data redundancy easialy. SMART is widespread and most operating systems are good at informing the user of impending failure.

Cons: Might be expensive, as I am not a HD manufacturer and do not know what it would cost to implement this. Standard Raids would be better for larger logical drive setups. Performance effects may be to great for some applicatoins.

(Personal note: I've been sitting on this idea for a while... After stewing over it for this long, I'm sure this is a great idea, and HD Manufacturers should implement it!)

What do you think of this idea or comment?
(You can change your vote at any time)

I agree

No opinion

I disagree