[ Thanks to linuxconfig for this link.
]
“Abstract: RAID has still not been adopted by most
end-users despite its inherent quality such as performance and
reliability. Reasons such as complexity of RAID technology (levels,
hard/soft), set-up, or support may be given. We believe the main
reason is that most end-users own a vast amount of heterogeneous
storage devices (USB stick, IDE/SATA/SCSI internal/external hard
drives, SD/XD Card, SSD, …), and that RAID-based systems are
mostly designed for homogenous (in size and technology) hard disks.
Therefore, there is currently no storage solution that manages
heterogeneous storage devices efficiently.“In this article, we propose such a solution and we call it
PROUHD (Pool of RAID Over User Heterogeneous Devices). This
solution supports heterogeneous (in size and technology) storage
devices, maximizes the available storage space consumption, is
tolerant to device failure up to a customizable degree, still makes
automatic addition, removal and replacement of storage devices
possible and remains performant in the face of average end-user
workflow.“Although this article makes some references to Linux, the
algorithms described are independent of the operating system and
thus may be implemented on any of them.”