[clug] Redundant file systems the easy way

[Paul Wayper]

People,

Having recently had to install LVM across a 250GB and 160GB
disk (for MythTV, what else?), and finding a few SMART
errors on the latter, I'm becoming more interested in file
systems and underlying transports that provide some form of
data redundancy.  Of course, if I mirror the disks I get
full redundancy but lose half the space; if I stripe them I
get the space but lose any chance of surviving a single disk
failure.  I could do Multiple Device style RAID, but then I
have to have disks that are pretty much equal in size.  All
these solutions force you to do things a certain way in
order to gain a large chunk of security, and I think there's
a better way.

I've got an idea of how to create a file system that is
distributed across multiple disks that transparently copies
various bits of the file system across all the disks in the
system.  The big problem is that things like LVM and MD
exist to abstract away information about where the data is
stored from the file system that's doing the storing; and,
vice versa, LVM and MD don't pretend to know anything about
the file system on top of them.  You've taken away the very
information a file system has to know in order to protect
itself.

Obviously this is of limited interested (in a programming,
"how do I write one of these" sense) to most of the CLUG
list.  My question is simply where should I go and who
should I speak with to work on this idea?

Thanks in advance,

Paul