This SnapRAID occupies an interesting middle ground between the least “proper” solution and the most “proper” solution for when more resources aren’t available or justified, it seems.

Rather than a single drive, or dozens of drives, with data randomly duplicated around or lost when individual drives die. Rather than a huge volume on zfs with it’s large setup cost and lack of expandability (until AnyRaid is done) and potentially unneeded additional functionality.

Then mergerfs is a natural expansion offering a unified way to organize and access the data that SnapRAID is securing (instead of mounting all those drives somewhere).

If someone merged these projects into one solution, and added a couple extra functions (like managing compression or deduplication, caching) it seems like it could be a comparable offer to zfs for different use cases. Imagine a NAS offering with this setup by default. Much more intuitive to users I would argue.

Sounds interesting, thank you!