[throwaway_bad]

> every other byte of data striped across

I assume you didn't mean that literally because I can't see how that will ever work out in terms of cpu cost. I think breaking it up into blocks like what RAID4/5/6 would be better but will still impact the performance of reads.

The performance of writes is going to be worse. Not because of the parity calculation but because you will be taking the max latency over all the cloud providers.

I can't see people trading off that much performance for better fault tolerance (in a world where S3 guarantees 11 nines) or ease of switching.

[chickenpotpie]

Yeah, RAID 4/5/6 are planned for the future. The plan is to offer all of them and let developers choose what is the best practice for their application. RAID 0/2/3 are not CPU efficient, but are great for privacy and security. No cloud provider has the full picture and can't spy on your data and if they have a data leak it won't be anything useful. RAID 1 gives great fault tolerance with no extra latency (except on failures) and prevents vendor lock-in.