TW>maybe there's some device driver programmer out there 
TW>looking for a project ? 

TW>You already heard about RAID (redundant array of 
TW>inexpensive disks) and maybe you also have seen the prices 
TW>for such hardware (EXPENSIVE - not inexpensive).

TW>OK, for a big company it is no problem investing $10000 for 
TW>a fault tolerant RAID disk subsystem, but for the "power 
TW>user" it IS a problem.

TW>But I think many of these power users would only want more 
TW>speed so that fault tolerance  is not a "must have".

TW>So how about this idea ? :

  It's a good idea and it's been done.  There is a product called "EzRaid"
for OS/2 which I believe satisfies all the criteria you suggest and more. 
It apparently supports all levels of RAID and operates with different sized
drives (also you can mix IDE and SCSI).  Apparently the cost of this is
less than $200US.

   This must be a fairly good product because a reasonable senior IBM
representative recommended it to me.  I had told him that I wanted to get
HPFS386 for a large cache on my LAN Server system but LS4.0 Advanced was
too expensive, he recommended getting EzRAID for it's caching facility.

  As the demand for RAID is fairly limited at the moment I don't believe
that a second product on the market would make a lot of money and if I was
you I would look into producing other products for commercial gain. 
However if you are doing this as a PD effort then it is great and I'm sure
that there will be a good demand amoung BBS sysops etc for it.  If you do
go ahead with this I suggest that you contact the marketting people
responsible for selling EzRAID and get a feature list from them to help
with the design of your product.


   Good luck!


  cya
___
 X MR/2 2.0 NR X OS/2: Windows with bullet-proof glass.

--- Maximus/2 2.02