I was thinking that a cool product idea would be an external hard disk housing that connected to the computer via Firewire (400 & 800) and USB (1 & 2) (and maybe even Ethernet?) and inside had a Serial ATA bus and did hardware RAID. So I could have this portable little RAID box that I could bring to different computers as necessary, not having to worry about setting up RAID on each machine, etc. It’d be great to just have a couple hundred gigs lying around that I could access reasonably fast but that was also “safe”.
I want what you want, but I don’t really care about the difference between SATA and IDE. It’s close to happening. Oxford has a chipset that can do RAID-0 for IDE drives, but so far I haven’t seen a device that ships with it.
I’m sure they’ll make another generation that does a “safer” RAID implementation. When it happens I’ll push hard to make sure we make one.
I’m pretty sure they have those already.
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10118
All it needs is onboard hardware raid and I’d be set.