The present invention overcomes the disadvantages of the prior art by providing a technique that stripes data containers across volumes of a striped volume set (SVS) using one of a plurality of different data placement patterns to thereby reduce the possibility of hotspots arising due to each data container using the same data placement pattern within the SVS. The technique is illustratively implemented by calculating a first index value, an intermediate index value and calculating a hash value of an inode associated with a data container to be accessed within the SVS. A final index value is calculated by multiplying the intermediate index value by the hash value, modulo the number of volumes of the SVS. Further, a Locate( ) function may be used to compute the location of data container content in the SVS to which a data access request is directed to ensure consistency of such content.