I think there's a place for non-redundant disk... it's just that you have to understand that while redundant disk mostly either works or doesn't, (well, it retu

I think there's a place for non-redundant disk... it's just that you have to understand that while redundant disk mostly either works or doesn't, (well, it returns all data or none, the speed can vary when it's in a non-optimal state, but it is rare to lose only some of the data on a raid, while losing only some of the data is the common failure mode for non-redundant spinning-disk.) a common failure mode for non-redundant disk is to make certain sectors inaccessible while the rest of the disk is okay. As long as you plan for that last part, (which can mean just wiping and reinstalling every time you get an unrecoverable read error, it can mean RMAing the disk after the first reallocated sector (as a RAID would) and it can mean doing something with something like zfs to catch errors and mark whole files bad. ) Centralized disk has it's own set of issues, though it is a possible solution.