Raid is an interesting technology. Companies that sell hard drives often use this technology. I wonder if they have to license it in order to avoid patent litigation . Do you guys know how this works?

Exciting stuff, Don.

I can sure do without some of the screaming. Nice article.

Yes, for those who don't know, Don's been with us since the putting-together-furniture days. We were discussing the new equipment in our Monday meeting, and I said, "we should blog about that!" So we enticed Don out of the cave...er...his office and asked him to tell everyone about it. Thanks for a great explanation, Don, feel free to blog any time!

Great blog Don... if I understood any of it! But to make it something I might understand then. A RAID is like an old vinyl record? You might only play one track a lot and whilst the part you play disintegrates, the rest of the record would perform fine if you could be bothered to move the tracks on? So your SSD drive spreads the wear and tear out across the disc without seemingly taking any time to reach or store stuff and thus making all tracks available at one click? Thereby extending the...

Think of RAID this way: You have a 3 disk drive RAID array. Using your vinyl record example, we'll consider each vinyl record on it's own LP player as a disk drive. Now our records can only be played at single speed, i.e.: audio speed. That's what we call the RPM, or the speed of the spindle. This means for a 6 minute song, if we stored it on one of our records, it would take us 6 minutes to listen to the entire song. It is not possible for us to play it any faster. The limitation of our...

Great blog, Don. Exciting stuff, for sure. Will these drives be used on hosting machines or LiveCloud?

Stand well back, Rosemary and Lori! Don! Your additional description made it all largely comprehensible to me! And that is no mean feat! Bravo! Give the guy a raise!

Greetings Steven: Everywhere and anywhere that we would have been using 6-8+ disk arrays for performance -- you can kiss the notion of a JBOD good bye. Our latest hardware addition, however, will be for some recent Enterprise customers. Greetings Xochiquetzal: Fantastic! I enjoy explaining technology, but haven't had much opportunity since leaving college; used to drive a white board after classes -- frequently, others would join for a sort of informal brown bag (but without the lunch). It...