PersonalRAID: Mobile Storage for Distributed and Disconnected Computers

This paper presents the design and implementation of a mobile storage system called a PersonalRAID. PersonalRAID manages a number of disconnected storage devices. At the heart of a PersonalRAID system is a mobile storage device that transparently propagates data to ensure eventual consistency. Using this mobile device, a PersonalRAID provides the abstraction of a single coherent storage name space that is available everywhere, and it ensures reliability by maintaining data redundancy on a number of storage devices. One central aspect of the PersonalRAID design is that the entire storage system consists solely of a collection of storage logs; the log-structured design not only provides an efficient means for update propagation, but also allows efficient direct I/O accesses to the logs without incurring unnecessary log replay delays. The PersonalRAID prototype demonstrates that the system provides the desired transparency and reliability functionalities without imposing any serious performance penalty on a mobile storage user.