For the last 18 months the Home Attached Storage market has grown at a CAGR of over 14% and the next 4 years are forecast to be similar (source Sandler Research).

 

I would hope unRAID's sales has grown at least at this rate, if it hasn't, some research about what the market wants might be in order.

A box you can take home, plug in, and it just work is probably what most people want.

 

Certainly everyone else who has a NAS at work has synology, d-link, qnap etc...  and I work in an IT department...

I remember years ago buying one of the first 1Gb drives for my Macintosh at home and that is when the penny dropped, at the time I was buying similar sized Winchester disks for our datacenters.

 

What's driving the home market is media.  Other documents haven't grown at the same rate (spreadsheets, word files etc), neither has our music, but our movies are moving up to 4K.  It doesn't take a genius to work out what comes next.  We've probably all been to an IMAX cinema, we are slowly and inexorably creeping toward something like that at home, perhaps all 4 walls, floor and ceiling.  Maybe not in the next 10 years but how many of us think we won't have that inside 100 years?  If we agree on that, could it be 50 years? or 25 years?

 

I built my first home server in 2004, it had 8 of 250Gb drives in a RAID5 configuration and to say it was unreliable was putting it mildly.  Now my collection is over 100TB at HD1080p and growing at over 3TB a month. It won't be long before I am storing 4K and will be collecting at over 12TB a month.  Even my home security system is using 10 CCTV cameras nearer to 4K than they are to HD1080p.

 

What attracted me to unRAID 3 years ago was being able to have one large server at a massive cost saving over what I used then (Thecus NAS boxes, and before that LaCie NAS boxes).  I also have an IT background and I am already considering the day when I will have a Petabyte, Moore's law says that will be inside 7 years and in my own experience, disks may be governed by Moore's law but my data grows much faster.  The last thing I want is to grow by adding servers, but I have no choice.  I am already back where I was with LaCie in 2006 and Thecus in 2007.  At least with unRAID my investment is protected, I don't need to scrap my disks like I used to do, but one thing I do know is I don't want to be running 5 servers again because I can't get one that's big enough.  A new techology to handle this will be unRAID's expiration date for me.

 

Somebody asked when we will have disks bigger than the ReiserFS will support (16TB), Moore's law says we will have those in under 3 years from now.

 

The succesful home storage companies in the future are going to be those who facilitate all this growth.  But even this is only a "fashion", the likes of NetFlix will evolve to satisfy our requirements.

 

Meanwhile, we have dinosaurs in the media market (Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, TV production companies et al) who haven't worked out that if they encourage their movies to be shared (eg BitTorrent) there is a whole new revenue opportunity.  For example, what would Coca Cola pay for a watermark advert in a corner of a blockbuster released in the filesharing community, where more downloads means more revenue?  How many such adverts could you put in a 2 hour movie?  All this nonsense about preventing filesharing  would stop and the consumer would get what he wants.  NetFlix would be free.

 

Let's consider this some more.  If just one studio moved to this revenue model, would it create a waterfall in the industry?  I think it would.  New filesharing sites like those pirate type ones would spring up, legally and sharing only watermarked content.  In fact, only watermarked content would ever be released!  If it's free then why rip it and store it at home?

 

Over time, consumers always get what they want, though it's often a painful process.  Consider prohibition, marijuana, napster became iTunes & spotify.

 

I can foresee a time when we have virtual storage online.  If the media is free (because of advertising), why would we all want to store it at home when one copy we can share in a datacenter is all we need, especially if our interet is Gigabit and this is all just round the corner.  I can foresee revenue models that would work for those media storehouses to give a free service to consumers.

 

I ordered my first unRAID system from Greenleaf with 20 of 3TB disks, that was before unRAID supported 3TB disks.  My new server will have 6TB disks. I sincerely hope unRAID is supporting >16TB disks well before 3 years is up.  What's the ethos in Linux programming? Do one thing and do it well.  unRAID stores home media very well, it needs to stay ahead of the curve until we no longer have home storage devices.

 

Of course the main problem in the interim is we have these insance devices that spin materials round in a gas, producing heat to store our digital data, failures waiting to happen.  Crazy.

 

 

You can count on us to support the growth of storage in line with the market.