I'm currently building a new file server to replace my old one. I am looking for a way to pool drives that has the following properties.
1. I do not want to have data redundancy, I just can't afford extra drives and my offsite backup is good enough for me.
2. Files should not be split across multiple drives. When I put a file on there it should be on a single drive.
3. Each hdd should be able to taken out individually to another comp and the data on it be readable without the other drives
4. When a drive fails the files on the nonfailed drives should be able to be read normally.
I think 3 and 4 are somewhat related in that if a system solves one the other should be solved to. I imagine by having the directory structure be duplicated on all drives in the pool and the drives be displayed in a merged fashion. Ideally I would like it to fill the drives fairly evenly where it chooses which drive to place a new file on based on which drive has the greatest % of free space.
The reason for this is that this drive has a partition for files of a certain type. Namely media files. Now it is inconvenient to have to go searching multiple folders to find a given series or movie so i would like to have them appear together. This also makes things simpler for the program that automatically renames and moves new files as I can just tell it to put it in this folder and not have to worry about which drive has space. There are a number of solutions to this problem I have found but they all fail the other criteria. namely that the entire group of drives becomes unreadable if one fails and they are not individually readable when taken to other machines. As I can't afford to provide redundancy in the pools and it is a significant bother to restore from my offsite backup this is a significant problem. Can storage spaces do this or is their another solution you know of that can do this. My old server was linux using lvm but I just can't stand the thought of losing data on several drives if one were to fail so I want to rectify this on my new server