Lazy Raid - Monday

About 4 years ago I started collecting a lot of digital media. I'm going to skip over how this content was procured. At the time I was storing it on my desktop computer's hard drive and using XBMC to stream it to hacked original XBOX. It worked great until I started running out of disk space. So I bought a few more hard drives and everything was fine until those filled up. So I bought some external enclosures and more disks. Eventually those filled up too.

At this point I had an idea to build a client side program that would lazily create parity blocks across a disparate set of drives to maintain the drive's independence from one another and also create a small safety net in case one of the drives should fail. A very similar system to this already exists in a RAID-5 set, UnRAID and Drobo devices. But all of those rely on either a dedicated device or system. This would be an independent client that would run as a daemon on a host system. I spent a couple of weekends working on the project but never finished it. The software was written in Perl and I'm guessing was probably quite a mess given my standards today. This week I'll be starting fresh and hopefully finishing it off.

Project Summary: Build a RAID like system for storing data independent from the host system.

Features:

• Single disk failure redundancy
• Double disk failure redundancy
• Background parity calculations
• Consistency checks
• FUSE integration