One large virtual drive

We have quite bit of space on individual workstations which is unused. I was wondering if there was a product which would allow us to tap into some of that space (individual partitions).
If we had empty partitions on workstations, and could manage them in a way to create a "virtual volume", and then map that "virtual volume" from a management system to allow all the user to access it as a mapped drive.

Ideally it could be done in a half size and be mirrored to another "virtual volume". But I may be pushing it!

Somebody smarter than me has had to come up with something like this.

Anybody hear of such a beast?

Thanks

Are all the PC's on at all times? Are you really wanting to use (if it exists) available space on one machine, mirrored to available space on another, then make that a volume for use by everyone in the office, all with desktop operating systems?

This sounds strange? Can you not up storage on the server/buy a new server with RAID? Perhaps Distributed File System in windows server products is a better, much safer solution…

Maybe I am not thinking 4th dimensionally enough to get this...

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Originally Posted by Ya_know

Are all the PC's on at all times? Are you really wanting to use (if it exists) available space on one machine, mirrored to available space on another, then make that a volume for use by everyone in the office, all with desktop operating systems?

This sounds strange? Can you not up storage on the server/buy a new server with RAID? Perhaps Distributed File System in windows server products is a better, much safer solution…

Maybe I am not thinking 4th dimensionally enough to get this...

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The computers are on all the time. I'm not sure it's an idea that'll work anyway.
I just know there is a whole bunch of unused hard drive space kicking around, and thought I might be able to use it as a "community drive". Someplace I could leave all my setup cd images on so they could be accessed from any machine on the lan, and whatever else we needed.

We'll run this idea up the flag pole, and see if anyone salutes it!

More feedback please.... good idea... or bad idea???

Thanks for the comeback!

Great idea, no idea how to go about that though.

Just think average office box has a 40ish gig drive, uses about 5-8 tops, as the rest (should be) on the server... leaving 30gig per machine going to waste.

Apart from the writing and synching issues, I imagine it will up the network traffic signficantly.

I would check with the patent office, see if anyone has had this idea.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NooNoo

Great idea, no idea how to go about that though.

Just think average office box has a 40ish gig drive, uses about 5-8 tops, as the rest (should be) on the server... leaving 30gig per machine going to waste.

Apart from the writing and synching issues, I imagine it will up the network traffic signficantly.

I would check with the patent office, see if anyone has had this idea.

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But the problem with newer drives these day, they fail much more frequently than years ago, because of the demand for cheeper larger drives. I wouldn't want to rely on a workstation to house any public documents. And a "network RAID" solution on desktop operating systems is very scary to say the least. The way I see it, the unused space should remain unused!

dfs could do it, but by the time you implement everything and figure out some failsafes for it the investment of your time (in monitary terms) would far exceed the cost of a couple of large drives to put on a server.

Ya, DFS would work but you'll also see huge system pauses if you glance/browse over a folder that's unavailable. This is very annoying.