jdb2's Journal: Making Use of Terabytes of Unused Storage

It seems no one really provided a satisfactory answer to your problem.
Here's a relatively elegant (if I may say so myself ;) and simple solution :


http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=447752&cid=22363564/


To be more detailed, first create a uniquely named empty directory on each
drive and set it to shared in Windows. ( eg. D1, D2 .. D105 - This can be
done with a script ) Then, set up a Linux system running Samba and UnionFS.
Mount all of the Windows shares on the Linux box. ( again, a script ) Next
create some new directory -- say "D-Store". Then use something like
'mount -t unionfs -o dirs=D1=rw:D2=rw:... unionfs D-Store' to make a union
of all these directories. Lastly, make "D-Store" a Samba share.
And, you're done. :)


Hope this helps.

Regards,

jdb2

P.S. You can use RAIF ( an error-correcting redundant extension to UnionFS )
if you want to ensure data integrity. ( works like RAID, but with file
systems )

: http://www.filesystems.org/docs/raif/index.html/