If you were talking about a spanned volume, I'd understand why you might be frustrated. With RAID, there's a physical relationship between the organization of the blocks of data, and the number and configuration of disks in the set.

If you have 4 disks in a stripe set, then the first 4 blocks of data go to each drive in sequence. The next 4 blocks do the same. Once you're on the billionth block, and you run out of space, you can't just add a new drive into the mix without having to rearrange all but the first 4 blocks.

For RAID levels that include mirroring, doing what you want would be technically possible.

It's certainly possible that someone could write code in the RAID firmware or software to take the mirrored drives out of the array, build a new array using them and 1 of 2 newly-added drives, copy the data from the original stripe set to the new larger one, switch to the new stripe set as the active one, add the second of the 2 newly-added drives to the old stripe set, and rebuild the updated original stripe set via mirroring, but there are more than a few potential disasters waiting to happen in that scenario.

While it might be technically possible to come up with a way to tack a disk on to a RAID 10 array, it would not be safe, and safety is one of the things that the letter R in RAID brings to the table (redundancy). If the process of adding the disks breaks redundancy (which it would have to, while it was happening), then that would be something that most folks would not be looking for as an option.

If you're saying Windows XP was a decent OS because the UI was consistent, then you will never understand why I'm saying that Windows XP was horrible. It was a kludgy, buggy, security-hole-riddled skinned refresh of Windows 2000 (most of those changes they thankfully left out of Windows Server 2003).

Windows Vista was a decent comeback with it's own personality problems, and Windows 7 fixed most of the perceived issues. Windows 8/8.1 has metro/modern silliness, but it works very well, is less crash-prone than Win7, which was less crash-prone than Win2K (no need to mention windows XP in that list), and has pretty good performance, as well.

Your points about how XP was a good OS are points I find generally unimportant to the way in which I judge operating systems, although I understand why they might be important to you.

The UI and being used to it or not is something that time can change. The suckiness of certain aspects of how the OS works (or doesn't) day in and day out is what I'm talking about when I say win2k was nice, win 7 better, and win 8.1 an improvement on that (with winxp being the biggest dud of those 4). Vista wasn't even all that bad, except for some mistakes MS made related to UAC. I spent 6 months thinking about whether to build a new PC with win7 or win8, and decided on win8. Kids didn't have trouble. I didn't have trouble. Wife didn't have trouble. Upgraded the in-laws and they even get along fine with win8. If the UI differences bug you enough for it to be a deal-breaker, then I can understand your disagreement, but they give me no trouble at all.

Windows 8.1 isn't in need of being fixed, really. It's better than Windows 7, which was better than Windows 2000 (windows XP was a heaping pile of dung).

Radio shack still sells stuff like this, apparently (at least they do online).

Exactly! And don't forget how expensive the cinnamon and flavored syrups are, too!

They don't pay $4.00 for a cup of coffee. They *do* pay $4.00 for coffee-flavored steamed milk and other drinks with varying proportions of milk and coffee. Milk is expensive. Duh.

Bear in mind that doing so gives Comcast a copy of every email you send, of course.