Last weekend I found some blog posts by a blogger who calls himself "Fear the Cowboy" discussing some of the more severe technical limitations that RAID (especially RAID 5) has compared to Windows Home Server Drive Extender.  Check out his posts here.

His posts got me motivated to write this one, which I've been meaning to do for quite some time...

When we were thinking of building the Windows Home Server product and doing focus groups we'd ask consumers "what do you know about RAID".  Uniformly the answer was (at least in the U.S.) "Oh, that's a insect repellant".

Geeks & IT professionals know RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Independent Disks" and is a storage technology widely used in the corporate IT world.

Those same geeks, when encountering Windows Home Server for the first time, often ask the question "Why doesn't Windows Home Server use RAID?".  The simplest answer is RAID sucks as the basis for a consumer storage product.  But, my PR team would rather I not say it in such a negative way. Instead, they want me to say something positive like: