Office RAID

With the importance of hard drive speed and the high cost of SSDs, many hard drives are being over-specified in size in order to gain a modest performance benefit in speed. As a result, most workstation users only use a fraction of their hard drive space (unless it's full of non-work- related files or unless their position is a rare one that requires a lot of space on the local drive). In the spirit of the private cloud and taking a hint from file-sharing networks, proposed is an office RAID where each workstation is connected with a gigabit NIC and has a small iSCSI target partitioned off of the main hard drive. In a RAID-6 configuration, a 100GB space sectioned off of 22 users would yield 2TB of space available to the team for work- related files that otherwise isn't being used. (A RAID level more redundant than 6 might be employed; 0 would be far too risky and 1 would be unnecessary.) The speed wouldn't be great; it would be foolish to use that space to boot over the network or host a database. This would be ideal for infrequently consulted reference materials or old archives where extra capacity in redundant server-grade storage devices would be unjustifiable. Laptops would be excluded because they aren't always on the network, but the striping of the data could prevent sensitive information from being stolen (depending on whether a useful piece of sensitive data could fit in a single block). In advanced implementations, the programmer might even consider prioritizing the first n-2 subset of targets by the closest ping times.