waffle

I have a vision. It’s of a hard drive storage solution. I call it The Storage.

The Storage would be a six-pack sized appliance. It would sport USB, FireWire and Gigabit Ethernet ports. It would be hollow, with four slots, and carry connectors inside those slots. It’d also have some sort of chip inside it supporting a stripped-down Linux (or *BSD) distribution and reasonable (256 or 512MB) flash storage (for its inner workings and stuff you want to run from it in addition to the disk and shares management).

To each of the four slots, you could hook a drive module. The drive module would consist of a 3.5″ hard drive and an interface plate, hosting USB and FireWire connectors, and a special connector. The idea is that the interface plate would hook into the connectors inside The Storage, connecting the hard drive to it. The interface plate would snap onto any 3.5″ hard drive, and there would be one model for SATA drives, one for IDE/Parallel ATA and maybe even one for SAS. (The special connector mentioned earlier would be a passthrough for the current interface - whichever it is - when connecting to The Storage, and power would go through the FireWire plug.)

The whole idea behind The Storage beyond those technical specifications is based on these observations:

1. There are very capacious hard drives now.
2. Many people need reasonably capable portable hard drives for moving files or working out of the office.
3. Many people need very capable external hard drives at home or in the office for backup.
4. More often than not, you need to buy completely separate products for 2 and 3.

The Storage would pool all your stuff together. It’d work with pretty much any 3.5″ hard drive you could throw at it, from the cheapest to the most expensive. It would allow you to tear off just this one hard drive and use it as a regular portable hard drive, leaving the rest of your drives available for automated backup jobs, indexing, rendering or whatever else you could cook up.

The Storage would be reasonably priced - say $100 to $200 including the appliance and one or two drive plates - and you could periodically grow your storage with off-the-shelf hard drives for reasonable amounts of money.

The Storage is technically possible today, but no one is doing it.