Object Storage

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/290124-32-raid-recovery

http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Post-RAID-alternatives-address-RAIDs-shortcomings

RAID is quickly reaching it's technical limits, and imposes major costs on users. It's time to move beyond RAID, and utilize other methods of Software-based redundancy such as Object Storage or Erasure Coding.


 * Distributed Object Storage - Items are insteads stored as Objects in Containers. These objects are effectively backed up on many unrelated drives on a case by case basis, configurable based purely upon how much you care about it.
 * Ceph - Popular distributed Object Storage system developed by Red Hat. Provides an Amazon S3 compatible API.
 * Project Greyhole - Uses Samba to keep things in sync.
 * Erasure Coding - Data is encoded in a way that allows the whole dataset to be reconstructed even if portions of it are damaged or lost. This is similar to DVDisaster.
 * Logical Volume Groups
 * LVM
 * ZFS - http://www.datamation.com/data-center/the-zfs-story-clearing-up-the-confusion-1.html

RAID vs Object Storage
At 4TB, RAID becomes utterly ineffective due to long rebuild times.

http://storagegaga.com/4tb-disks-the-end-of-raid/