Non-RAID drive architectures

Non-RAID drive architectures also exist, and are referred to by acronyms with tongue-in-cheek similarity to RAID:

Drives are merely concatenated together, end to beginning, so they appear to be a single large disk, known as SPAN or BIG.

[citation needed] What makes a SPAN or BIG different from RAID configurations is the possibility for the selection of drives.

[9] The btrfs filesystem can span multiple devices of different sizes, including RAID 0/1/10 configurations, storing 1 to 4 redundant copies of both data and metadata.

[14][15][16] Compared to RAID technology, MAID has increased storage density, and decreased cost, electrical power, and cooling requirements.

[15] To allow a more gradual tradeoff between access time and power savings, some MAIDs such as Nexsan's AutoMAID incorporate drives capable of spinning down to a lower speed.