Mike Hardy wrote:

What I'm thinking of doing is writing a small (or, as small as possible, 
anyway) perl program that can take a few command line arguments (like 
the array construction information) and know how to read the data blocks 
on the array, and calculate parity, as a baseline. If perl offends you, 
sorry, I'm quicker at it than C by a long-shot, and I don't really care 
about speed here, just speed of development.

Here's the shell script I'm using as a test harness. It creates a 
loopback raid5 system, fills it up with random data, and then takes the 
md5sum. It has a few modes of operation (to initialize or not as it 
starts or stops the array).

-Mike