Rating: +0
Backup/secondary storage drives are ever bigger and cheaper. Plug in a single USB connector and you have another XX TB reachable from your laptop. BUT... finding something there means you have to index/reindex, suddenly you have duplicates, takes forever. Plugging it in takes a half second, indexing it takes an hour.
Why don't drives maintain their own indexes which can be tapped into by the main search service (spotlight, desktop search, etc) when the drive gets plugged in. The drive has the processing power, could be doing it offline, always up to date.
Sure, there're are issues of privacy, etc, to be resolved, but all surmountable.
Hi Marc,
A front end appliance is probably the better way to go, hardware based vs. software would be a nice differentiator - some difficulties would be the levels of accuracy that can be provided. Indexing engines, especially the free variety give a false sense of security that a search request yields accurate results and that's not the case - there are many file types that are not supported, file types that can contain various levels of special characters that cause the indexing engine to abort, etc. - also the I/O needed for massive indexing would keep CPUs pretty pegged you either need to allot or dedicate CPU time, adding to the complexity of adding to the rationale to offload this to a dedicated appliance. You have some good examples of hardware based encryption solutions vs. software based - this might be a good model to follow for what you’re proposing. The next question, is will someone pay more for this? And what's the actual business purpose, need? What specific problems would it solve? If it was available who and how many could be sold or up sold? What's the cost of maintenance? Do you build of buy? What make this different than Google’s current offerings? After you run through this entire list, and more, of questions, you might find that you're better off proposing a standardized interface to do what you’re suggesting and let someone else build the applications and solutions. It's definitely a good idea worth kicking around.
Good Luck,
Peter
May 2009