Yep, worked with LVM on Linux, along with similar concepts in the hardware RAID arena as well. And yes, I do understand that RAID is a block level operation, and thats where my issue with it comes it. It can be great for many applications. But I think for home use, something that works at a file level can be much more beneficial to use. Going to a file level redundancy easily avoids any mess with LVM or any other methods for avoiding the complicated setups to workaround the base concepts of RAID.

So far, my best impressions of storage products (be it Linux RAID, or hardware devices) has always been better the less I must know about the inner workings of the solution to set it up and operate it on a daily basis. (Probably a loaded statement there, since my last one gave the impression I don't know about RAID ) The EVA storage line was really fun to work with at my previous job. It was this big rackmount system, capable of going up to 252 disks. As for setup, there were definitely optimal ways of doing things, but the hardware took care of it. To create a virtual disk to share out over the SAN to servers, you simply told the controller that you wanted an X gb sized vdisk, with redundancy like RAID 0, RAID 1, or RAID 5. You didn't tell it what physical disks to store the data on, instead the controller would decide where the most optimal place was, in terms of both performance and redundancy. With 18 different disk shelves it would usually favor spreading the data across as many different ones as possible This was done to ensure that if an entire shelf went down, data was still there and accessible. It also would migrate data around as the configuration changes. So if you started out with only 6 shelves, then added 2 more later with disks in them, the controller just took care of migrating data. And the disks inside never had to be the same size. So it was a great system to allow expandability, either over a period of weeks, or a period of years when drive sizes have increased dramatically.