I agree with @browned. Recently, I was extremely close to moving my server to an alternate Linux based OS that supports drive pooling/merging and parity natively. The only reason I ultimately decided against it (and sticking with a Windows OS with Covercube products) was completely unrelated to my current storage needs.
I would buy a new product or extension to my existing Drivepool license to have this functionality!
IMO, at the enthusiast level, without lots of money for extra drives or homelab level hardware, being a datahoarder gets truly complicated as you fill up the machines chassis. At 8 spinners in my full size tower, I only really have room for 1 more without modding the chassis or buying somewhat expensive "patches" to the root problem. I view the root problem as inefficient, fault tolerant data archival. There is no way I would ever run storage solutions without a level of fault tolerance. The only things on my pool that aren't duplicated are items that are easily accessible online for re-download (i.e. OS ISO images, digitally distributed games, etc.). Everything else is at least duplicated at a 1:1 level ... and the truly important stuff, at 1:2+. I'm already almost at the end of my rope in terms of physical capacity, and something, possibly drastic, has to change for my data retention strategy. What @browned spoke to is where I find myself going ... and currently, this means cobbling together a less than ideal solution of software.
Currently, some of this can be done using the SSD optimizer plug-in (though I have never used it) even if the drives aren't SSDs. Though, without parity as a fault tolerant protection, doing this with HDDs and duplication as the fault tolerant protection plan is pretty silly. Drivepool's balancer is pretty great! Kicking in when it needs to ... minimizing intrusion into other, possibly more important tasks ... I've never had any issues! Similarly, Scanner's influence on what to do with data when a drive is being wonky has saved me at least 3 times I can remember! I'm not really wanting to give those up, especially as Scanner's functionality seems to not have an equivalent in the Linux world! Incorporating a parity strategy as an alternative to a duplicating strategy seems like it would fit right in!
I could go into details on my personal setup and options I was toying with, but I don't want to dilute the message here and take the conversation off on a tangent.
TL;DR; Parity please and I will pay for it!
-JesterEE
