When considering how to protect from media failure, most IT professionals assume they must use some form of RAID. The problem with RAID is it limits levels of redundancy to one or two drives per RAID set. It also is inflexible and not ready for the future. RAID groups can’t typically intermix drives of various sizes and still can’t use each drive’s full capacity. The lack of flexibility means as drives (both flash and hard disk) become denser, the customer can’t fully adopt them without creating a whole new volume. Another problem for RAID is its time to bring a volume back into a protected state, especially because of increasing drive density. Customers tell us that they are experiencing multi-day rebuild times.
