network "raid"

[Grobyc]

Anyone know of a way of doing the following ?

what I want to do is essentually a network from of jbod raid

on the network is several workstations with various size hdd's the workstations only use a few gigs and all that space is waisted

what i would like to do is partition off say 80% of the drive on each workstation and merge all that space into a "single drive" basiclly a jbod raid.
it would need to be setup in such a way that if one of the workstations was off that it didnt worry the drive (say those files would just be "unavailable")

I have thought of using dfs but unless it can be setup as a single "share" that when 1 drive/partition is full to start on the next one automaticlly (unfortunatly my experence with dfs is very limited)

data security/backup is not required and if say one drive/partition was to completely dissapear only the files that were on it would become unavailable rather than the whole "raid" like it doe with jbod.

any ideas on a way / software to do this?

[CeeBee]

DFS will give you redundancy and is available only for server OS's.
XP won't be able to do it due to the limit in the number of connections it accepts. If you want storage throw 3x500G on a server in a RAID5 and you have 1TB with redundancy :D Too simple and cheap to be worth doing anything else.