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I've been thinking about all the workstations I have on my shop floor (about 50) and the wasted drive space each of them has. For instance, my machines only use about 30G to 40G of local storage, yet they're coming from the manufacturer with 500G to 1T drives. All that extra space is a waste in my opinion. Is there some way to gather all that extra space together, use some sort of striping for redundancy (in case a machine or three or four are offline) across all the workstations, and then access it like one large SAN?

Albion
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  • As appealing as the idea may seem the idea of using non-redundant consumer grade drives scattered across multiple machines, any of which could crash or die at any time is risky, at least for data you value. – John Gardeniers Apr 19 '12 at 23:33
  • One of my Admin friends said the same thing. I just thought there might be a way (when speed isn't an issue) to utilize that extra wasted space. But I guess you're right, it'd be way too insecure for any type of corporate implementation. – Albion Apr 20 '12 at 13:21

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It'll depend on the operating system you're running on those workstations.

On Linux, you can have something like GlusterFS: http://www.gluster.org/about/.

Also, look at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_systems#Distributed_parallel_fault-tolerant_file_systems

cjc
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