The problem with unRAID is that it doesn't provide full-blown redundancy. If you have multiple drives (say 5) and two of them fail you have no way of reconstructing the information stored on them. It's a software-dependent data safety system that attempts to reconstruct the missing data based on the content of the other drives. On the other hand in WHS if you lose 2 of your five drives and they don't contain each other's backups you will lose nothing. What it turns to is a trade-off between money and your data security (as always). Microsoft made the decision to go with data security. The question is: why not provide both?
a) Microsoft just like every other corporation out there is a for-profit company. It will do the least amount of work possible to get the most amount of money. Adding a feature like that is a lot of work and likely patent licensing with arguable return on investment. b) Joe Blow (for whom this software is made by the way) won't understand the difference between unRAID's approach and WHS's current approach. He'll see that both can provide data safety, choose the way that gives him more storage, ignore the red warning that tells him one of his disks is nearly gone (because he can still access his data) and will then get really angry when another disk fails and he can't get at his data anymore. People have an unfortunate habit of messing around with options they don't understand and not doing proper research.
This is just an opinion but: I don't feel that it would be responsible to sell a product mainly intended for data back-up that doesn't offer at least double redundancy of data, especially given that the target audience isn't us, it's Joe Blow, who will buy the server and assume that all of his information is guaranteed to stay locked in that little box for all eternity (acts of god excluded).
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
The problem with unRAID is that it doesn't provide full-blown redundancy. If you have multiple drives (say 5) and two of them fail you have no way of reconstructing the information stored on them. It's a software-dependent data safety system that attempts to reconstruct the missing data based on the content of the other drives. On the other hand in WHS if you lose 2 of your five drives and they don't contain each other's backups you will lose nothing. What it turns to is a trade-off between money and your data security (as always). Microsoft made the decision to go with data security. The question is: why not provide both?
a) Microsoft just like every other corporation out there is a for-profit company. It will do the least amount of work possible to get the most amount of money. Adding a feature like that is a lot of work and likely patent licensing with arguable return on investment.
b) Joe Blow (for whom this software is made by the way) won't understand the difference between unRAID's approach and WHS's current approach. He'll see that both can provide data safety, choose the way that gives him more storage, ignore the red warning that tells him one of his disks is nearly gone (because he can still access his data) and will then get really angry when another disk fails and he can't get at his data anymore. People have an unfortunate habit of messing around with options they don't understand and not doing proper research.
This is just an opinion but: I don't feel that it would be responsible to sell a product mainly intended for data back-up that doesn't offer at least double redundancy of data, especially given that the target audience isn't us, it's Joe Blow, who will buy the server and assume that all of his information is guaranteed to stay locked in that little box for all eternity (acts of god excluded).