Create a device with a bunch of USB (or firewire) sockets, which when multiple external hard drives (or even USB thumb drives) are plugged into them, the drives become a RAID array. Provide RAID niceties of rebuilding the array after a disk is lost, and expanding the size of the array if larger disks are inserted (one by one).
This could be done all in software with a USB hub.
The lack of consumer adoption of RAID despite apparent consumer demand for reliable storage appears to be the dearth of actually inexpensive disks. Perhaps the hardware overhead of a hard drive always makes them cost at least about $50,which when you multiply that by 2 or 5 depending on how many disks you want in your array, becomes quite a lot. And we want small form factor to fit a bunch of disks. Perhaps USB keys are the way.
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