On the Soapbox

I recently noticed that both Dell and Gateway are offering RAID-0 hard drive setups. What was interesting about this was that there were only three types of hard drive options that Dell and Gateway offered: single drive, RAID-0, and RAID-1. There was no option to have a second drive without RAID.

While it is good to see companies offering RAID-1 to mainstream customers, it is surprising to see them offer RAID-0. First, nobody should ever be running hard drives in a RAID-0 setup. Well, okay, there are some situations where RAID-0 makes sense, but they are rather special and they certainly do not apply to Joe Sixpack buying from Dell or Gateway. These are people who would be unable to make much use of (or even notice) the performance boost from RAID-0, and these are also people who tend to be very lax about data backup. In other words, the average computer users that these companies are selling RAID-0 to represent a group that is probably the least likely to benefit from RAID-0 and is also probably the most vulnerable to the greatly increased risk of catastrophic data loss posed by RAID-0.

And it is not the offering of RAID-0 that is troubling, but rather how they are offering it. First, both companies label RAID-0 as "performance", and in the case of Dell, they even have a page touting the performance advantages of RAID-0. Okay, there is nothing wrong with that since RAID-0 is faster. Second, they do not post any information whatsoever about the risks of RAID-0. So not only are there no warnings presented when a user chooses RAID-0, if a user actually takes the unusual step of reading what RAID-0 is all about on the Dell website, they will not find a single word talking about the downsides of RAID-0. If a consumer chooses RAID-0 with the knowledge of the huge risk that is being taken, that is fine: it is their choice. But that is not the case if a consumer chooses RAID-0 because s/he has been told incomplete information (and before free-market advocates can criticize that sentence, I would like to remind everyone that one of the conditions necessary for free markets is symmetric information, and this is a violation of that). Third, RAID-0 is also the best possible price point. A single 500GB hard drive costs more than two 250GB drives, so the user is presented with the option to get 500GB worth of total capacity for less money and for improved performance. Who could resist? Of course, that two lower-density drives could cost less than a single high-density drive is nothing new, but in the past, people who took the two-drive option were just given two hard drives, without getting them chained together into a reckless RAID-0 setup. Furthermore, that non-RAID option no longer exists at either Dell or Gateway: if you want to take advantage of the lower cost of two hard drives, you are now being forced to take the RAID-0 option. Finally, this setup is rather prominently marketed and is being presented as a mainstream option instead of a "for people who know what they are doing" option. In the past, Dell would offer people a choice over the number of hard drives and then as a separate advanced option, they offered the user a chance to chain them together in RAID. Not any more: the RAID is built straight into the main hard drive selection. In fact, it is so mainstream that there is one Gateway offer where there was a free upgrade to the 500GB RAID-0 setup.

So why would they do this? I have a theory: over the years, Joe Sixpack has gotten drilled into his dull little mind that "C:" is the hard drive and that "D:" is the cupholder CD/DVD drive. Imagine the confusion when Joe Sixpack now has a computer where "D:" is a second hard drive and that the CD/DVD drive is now "E:". Furthermore, would Joe Sixpack really know how to use a second hard drive? In all likelihood, he will install programs to their default locations (on C) and he will save his files in "My Documents" or on the Desktop, which is also on C. And eventually, the C drive may fill up while D remains empty (preemptive note to Mac/Unix people: NTFS is perfectly capable of Unix-style drive-in-a-folder mounting; in fact, I use it extensively, but even mounting cannot completely solve this problem because inevitably, Joe Sixpack will be wondering why one of his folders is full and why the others are not or vice-versa). Now that the new Intel chipsets make it possible to do RAID without installing extra hardware, companies have realized that they can wipe away the confusion that two hard drives will cause average computer users while even touting a bit of a performance boost. Of course, the cost of this blissful ignorance is data insecurity, especially since studies show that members of the Sixpack family rarely back up the digital assets that they value the most: photos, personal documents, etc.