[fuse-devel] 'cache' filesystem: is FUSE appropriate?

[Scott J. <sco...@ya...>]

I have a file server containing many disks with mostly large files (movies). For 
power savings, I would like to keep them spun down, and spin up one disk as 
needed. But I'd like to avoid the latency associated with disk spinup.

My plan is to use one disk that is always spinning to store the beginning of 
every large file. When a file is opened, I read the beginning from this cache 
disk while the disk with the full contents spins up. When I exhaust the cached 
portion, I read the remainder of the file from the now-spinning disk.

[This works only because the typical access pattern in my case is to read a file 
sequentially from the beginning.]

Note that it does not need to consolidate the multiple data disks into one 
filesystem. I am fine creating one cache filesystem per data disk, all sharing a 
single cache drive.

Has anybody done this before? (No need to reinvent the wheel.)

If not, does this sound feasible with FUSE? Is FUSE the right technology to use 
for something like this?