Despite the apparent energy benefits, MAID is still an emerging technology. Specific details on the size of the MAID market are hard to come by, although Copan says that its customer list now numbers around 100.
MAID users aren't likely to stop asking for the kind of value-added features Copan is considering. Some have also urged vendors to emulate Fibre Channel technology, which typically has two controllers per drive, offering redundancy in the event of a problem on the path to the MAID disk drive.
Although the disks used within Copan's MAID systems do not have dual ports, Santilli says that the vendor has tackled this issue by building a specialized chip into the canisters which contain the drives. "The chip allows us to dual-port all 14 drives," he explains, adding that this offers two paths to each drive.
The other issue cited as a major drawback of MAID is performance compared to other disk-based technologies such as SATA and optical disk. Since disks must be woken up and spun in response to an access request, the performance won't match that of already spinning disks.
Even Copan admits this. "If I was in an environment that was a heavily transactional environment, I wouldn't use MAID," says Bill Mottram, the vendor's vice president of corporate marketing. "But if I was in an environment where data has to be accessed less frequently, it's not an issue."
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