I would really like to have access to 0 redundancy mass storage as a linode add on. Seems easy enough to do.
This way I could use RAID for my system files and documents, but another mounted disk that is cheap and has no redundancy.

0 redundancy?
RAID0?

i really don't think this is possible.
i am sure that they already have RAID10 and max out the drive bays i each server. dedicating drives just for RAID0 would be silly.

unless they had some crazy fast NAS but then you are limited to the speed of the interface between the NAS and the server.

You can add more than one Raid Controller to a server.
I don't think hardware interface for more storage is a problem.
You could a a 2U Raid storage rack.

I believe you are assuming that drive bays internal to the server are the only possible way to add storage to a system without switching Network attached storage, which is not correct.

There's firewire, there's SATA, USB!

all of which you would not want to use for multiple hosts access a shared repository.

It would need to be iscsi or fibre channel, all of which are expensive

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Firewire 800 wouldn't have enough throughput for 30 users?
I think that is how many users there are on a Linode 768.
I read that firewire can transfer about 100 Mega Bytes a second max.
isn't that enough?

Do most 1U servers only have space for 1 hardware raid controller?

If only this was discussed and ANSWERED BY LINODE sometime in the recent past.

Oh yeah, it was.

http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5238

the issue is that it will take up space, space that is more profitable by putting in another server.

There are many forum posts covering storage and feature requests as well as many people complaining about the price so even though I am not sure if my thoughts have already been covered, I will post them here.

I have 2 Linodes at the same datacenter, each VM uses 6GB for the OS and then each VM uses the remaining 10GB as a DRBD network raid mirror.

In effect, using DRBD doubles the price of storage as 20GB (10GB on each VM) only gives total capacity of 10GB.

As I have used Xen in my local network setup, I understand that it is possible to mount a single disk image across Xen VM's.

Also, because Linode possibly uses SAN's in a RAID10 (or however they have it configured), my DRBD is only beneficial in failover and a network RAID mirror used for redundancy seems a waste when already sat on a RAID10.

So would it be possible to consider allowing owners of multiple Linodes to pool storage and make the resulting Virtual disk available to all their nodes in Xen fashion?

(this would have to be an advanced feature as the use of clustered file systems like OCFS and GFS2 within the VM's at the same datacenter - maybe a setting like 'allow this disk image on multiple nodes').

It would be great to hear peoples thoughts on this as Linode can still charge the same for storage and anyone with similar setups as myself needn't charge an arm and a leg to their customers by simply providing failover.

Linode doesn't use SANS.

Last word was that Linode used four 15k RPM drives in RAID-10 per server, and since they're not using SSDs and there isn't anything faster since, they probably still are.