Roland,
I know this has been asked before regarding "showing all drives as one", but I think this may actually work this time from what I've seen.
Drive Bender: http://www.drivebender.com/index.php/features.html
Basically what I've come to gather
1) It will pool hard drives into one large storage drive, but will keep data whole on individual drives (not split as with Raid)
2) It allows you to still show the drive letters to the system (allowing you to assign them in disparity config)
3) All data additions/deletes/moves must take place on the large Pool once it has been created (deleting or adding to the individual drives themselves does not allow data to be reflected in the pool)
Based on this, do you see any reason why Disparity wouldn't function as it does now? Any files you add/delete/move would be done through the pool, where by it automatically adds files to the drives it feels like based on space considerations. At that point, running an update or create, the config would recognize the individual drives for creation/updating and do so on the parity drive accordingly. The parity drive of course, would NOT be part of the pool.
I've been running disparity for over 2 years now and the ONLY thing I can see being a problem, is if a drive fails, you would have to remove it, place a new fresh drive in, and run a "Disparity Recover" for the drive that failed, at that point disparity would manually replace all the files onto that new drive, the problem would come in because the recover process added them to the drive itself and not the drive pool. At this point I think the drive pool would need to be disbanded (which is possible through drive bender without any data loss, as all data is stored wholly on the drives and not spread across them) and then re-created to sync all data on the drives.
What are you thoughts on this Roland? I know TONS of people have hounded you on this issue before and I know it's something that keeps many people from using disparity because they don't like having to manage drive space/data allocation (It almost kept me from running it years ago)
If anyone else has any thoughts/input, feel free to add them, I'm hoping we can finally get a solution for drive-pooling with disparity. The best of both worlds :)
Thank you for your time Roland