Systems and techniques to pseudorandomly place and redistribute data blocks in a storage system (100), and also to implement continuous media systems and systems to transfer media streams between a server and a client. In general, in one implementation, the techniques include: distributing data blocks over multiple storage devices (100) according to a reproducible pseudorandom sequence that provides load balancing across the storage devices (160), and determining current storage locations of the data blocks by reproducing the pseudorandom sequence (110).