Tuesday, October 23, 2007
What Do You Think When I Say CompactFlash RAID?
What I think (when I say “CompactFlash RAID") is why? At least, for now I think why?
Addonics Technologies announced a $50 PCI card Tuesday that’s got four CompactFlash card slots. The cards can be configured as four individual drives, a single large volume, or set up with RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) 0, 1 or 10 to stripe data across multiple cards or mirror data from one onto another.
Note that there’s no support for RAID 5 and that cards can’t be hot-swapped, so no adding capacity nondisruptively by plugging in newer, bigger flash cards, according to President Bill Kwong.
Not as flexible. Tremendously more expensive even with far lesser capabilities. Not hot swappable.
When the price of those little cards comes down enough, this will make far more sense--at least, assuming that there isn’t a similar reduction in the cost of spinning platters or that some other technology doesn’t supplant both of the above. Maybe I’m not thinking creatively enough--maybe there is a person out there thinking, “CompactFlash RAID. I need that.”
I’m betting it’s more of an object of minor geek lust right now, though. I really don’t see a situation where the need isn’t served better by cheaper spinning platters.
Now, somebody set me straight.
Comments & Trackbacks
"What I think (when I say “CompactFlash RAID") is why? At least, for now I think why?”
Because you have to go through now to get to then. Let’s phrase it differently: Ultra-low-power-consumption RAID; Portable RAID.
I won’t buy this version, PCI is the wrong format. Do it as a PCMCIA card, though, and it starts to become really interesting. 16 GB, which you could get for about 120 dollars plus the card, is enough for quite a bit of software and data if you don’t do games or Microsoftware.
Diskless workstation. PCI works okay for that.
Maybe there are some applications which benefit from the high data transfer rate.