this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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That would require all of those disks to be connected at once which is a logistical nightmare. It would be hard with modern drives already but also consider that we're talking IDE drives here; it's hard enough to connect one of them to a modern system, let alone 12 simultaneously.
With an Index, you also gain the ability to lose and restore partial data. With a RAID array it's all or nothing; requiring wasting a bunch of space for being able to restore everything at once. Using an index, you can simply check which data was lost and prepare another copy of that data on a spare drive.
I'm just talking prebuilt solutions here, but how would you use an index'd storage base if the drives weren't connected? Sounds like that's an issue regardless
Note that all of this is in the context of backups; duplicates for the purpose of restoring the originals in case something happens to them. Though it is at least possible to use an index cold storage system like what I describe for more frequent access, I would find that very inconvenient for "hot" data.
You take a look at your index where the data you need is located, connect to that singular location (i.e. plug in a drive) and then copy it into the place it went missing from.
The difference is that, with an Index, you gain granularity. If you only need file A, you don't need to connect all 12 backup drives, just the one that has file A on it.