[savagejimmy]

I have a question about pooling storage and I’m not sure if its possible. I’ll try to explain myself as best I can. Here goes…

I have a rather large TV show collection spread across 5 external hard drives, soon to be 6. I am constantly running out of space on one drive or another and have to shuffle my shows around. I want to be able to combine the drives into one large drive. I know this is possible in Windows using a spanned volume or RAID 0. I don’t like the idea of this because if one of these drives happens to fail I lose everything. Due to how big they get I’d like to avoid a parity drive. If one drive fails I’m OK with losing the contents on one of them, just not all. My friends like to get my drives off me and copy shows as well.

Is there a solution available where it pools all of these volumes into one big volume, but spreads the content as equally as possible among the drives, either by percentage free space or total free space? I’m not too fussed. If I take one of these drives and plug it into another PC they can see whatever files may be stored on there, and the pooled storage just sees those folders and files missing or as non-existent? It would also need the ability to add volumes to this pool later as storage runs out. I would prefer a Windows solution but I’m OK with using Linux, preferably Ubuntu. Obviously I'd like to share this volume for XBMC to access. I’d like to keep the drives NTFS formatted. Did Windows Home Server do something like this at one stage? Any help would be appreciated.

[block134]

Most of what you are looking for can be done by unRaid http://lime-technology.com/. I am not sure if it will work with external hard drives though. It would require you to get away from NTFS (only on the computer with unRaid on it) and a windows server, you can still access everything via the network with either SMB, NFS, of AFP, but it will do everything else you asked for. I am working at copying all of my media over to one I just built a couple of days ago and love it so far.

You also may want to look into XBMC's Piracy Policy http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=119117 before you mention what your friends like to do.

[bobbintb]

i use unraid and it is great for what it does. not sure if it would help you out here. unraid uses reiserfs. it CAN use external ntfs drives but they wont be protected which you say isnt an issue for you. it would be very technical but worth a look.

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.ph...aid_server

you can also look at snapraid and flexraid.

most important, if you keep running out of space and keep needing to buy more drives you should seriously consider investing in a more permanent solution. external drives are usually a little more expensive and smaller capacity for your money. they are also meant for temporary storage/backup and data transfers not for long term data storage and archiving. it makes no sense to use a temporary solution as a permanent fix. i would recommend throwing those drives into a real file server and avoid all the issues you are having. you can re-purpose those same drives and its a better future proof solution. why keep buying another external drive that only increasingly fragments your files and makes it harder and harder to keep track of things? if you use a proper array/pool, all your management issues are permanently solved instead of exacerbated with each new drive. plus it is cheaper in the long run since internal drives are usually larger and cheaper than external. yea it may be more of a hassle to share with your friends since you will have to transfer files to an external to loan them but for me, it would be worth it. besides, ive been the go-to guy for that kind of thing and it sucks after a while. it's easier to teach someone how to get the data they want and let them get their own files.