So what do we do now?!
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.
yo dude.. i don’t buy it. I think we’re more likely to just see a shift of focus on creating drives with better hard error rates.
more likely a shift in hardware configuration. It will be easier. The goal is to increase speed, decrease errors and decrease consumption on several levels right… so I think you will start to see a real demand for a new hybrid version with SSD’s in front of the raid to eliminate those errors, increase the speed dramatically, and reduce the shear number of drives by quite a bit. I have to think raid will be around for some time yet, but it will be marginalized quite a bit.