MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) is a new storage technology for long-term, online storage of persistent data that takes advantage of a newer generation of SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) disk drives that are designed to be powered on and off and improve energy efficiency.

This allows denser packaging of drives in large-scale disk storage systems since only 25% of disks are spinning at any one time.

MAID provides for the power management of disks drives, thus creating a new service level for retaining and accessing “archive/persistent” data.

MAID is an alternative to traditional power-hungry disk-based storage or inexpensive and slow tape backup options. Like tape, MAID disk drives only power up and spin disks when the information on those disks is needed, which makes them well-suited for backup/recovery, replication and archiving applications. According to Copan co-founder Will Layton, MAID technology is able to bring the largest amount of data on-line, and does it in the most efficient way possible.