It is amazing how sometimes people combine things together to bring to life something new.

I have found this article on the Internet explaining how to build a completely free RAID 5 virtual system using only freely available software and services. This is cool.

The main concept is illustrated in the picture.

In order to have your system up and running you will need:

• A set of  free  ftp accounts on the Internet. Nowadays you can easily find lot of them around. Just  google for it.
• Netdrive. Netdrive will allow you to map an Internet resource like an FTP server to a local logical drive. In this particular case it will help you create the hard drives that will be the core of your virtual raid system.
• VMWare Server. This will help you to create a virtual system that will host the software to run your RAID virtual system.
• FreeNAS. This is the core software of your system.

All of these resources will not cost you a dime.

Going through the document you will see that setting up this system is somehow tricky and you will definitely need some sort of knowledge in order to get it working.

The web sites says that this is more of a proof of concept but I do note really see why thisshould not work.

Actually there are great issues with this kind of architecture (Availability, performance, etc) but this is really a great idea.

Unfortunately this seems to be oriented to Windows machines and I would like to see something similar on a Mac.

I love to see how people can mix up different product in order to bring new ideas on the table. In some way this is unconventional innovation and I really appreciate this kind of approach.