In my spare time I've been trying to solve the problem of network filesystems being too slow. To that end I've created CacheFS.
CacheFS keeps a lazy local copy of your network drive in an attempt to make your network drive appear as fast as your local drive.
The project is far from consumer-ready, but it has hit a major milestone: It caches reads and doesn't appear to corrupt anything. I'm throwing it out here in the off-chance that someone else finds it useful, and for constructive feedback. Enjoy!
https://github.com/cconstantine/CacheFS
There's already a CacheFS in Solaris. http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/4727-Less-known-Solaris-Fea...
Linux has a similar feature named FS-Cache, and one of its storage backends is named CacheFS. http://people.redhat.com/~dhowells/fscache/FS-Cache.pdf
Do you really want to make this situation even more confusing?