[lug] JBOD File Browser?

[Lori Reed]

On 09/16/2011 12:55 PM, Will wrote:

>    JBOD is an acronym for Just a Bunch of Disks and is not a technology
> or software package in and of its self.  I am not sure what your asking
> when you ask if JBOD can span multiple disks as well?

JBOD is a software package that allows (at least on some NAS products 
like the D-Link DNS-321) multiple drives to appear as a single drive.

I was asking if, on a JBOD array, a file can span multiple drives.

>    As for the simplicity that you are afforded by keeping files from
> spanning disks if your file system spans multiple disks either
> by concatenation or stripping you still loose the entire file system if
> you loose a disk regardless of if files span disks or not.

I have no idea what concatenation means in this context and I never said 
anything about striping (with one p). Nor (in the context of a file 
browser) am I talking about creating a new file system.

And the whole point to keeping each drive separate is that losing (with 
one s) one drive will not affect files on the other.

Merging two or more directories into a single tree for 
display/manipulation in a GUI browser is a dirt simple algorithm. From 
the first spark of an idea to design and consideration of the major 
components took me less than five minutes. Unfortunately, I estimate the 
implementation to be 80 to 120 hours, mostly due to the tedious nature 
of GUI programming.

Lori

> On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 12:33 PM, Lori Reed <lorireed at lightning-rose.com
> <mailto:lorireed at lightning-rose.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 09/16/2011 12:07 PM, Will wrote:
>
>      > LVM can concatenate two drives into one file system but will not
>     keep a
>      > file from spanning the two drives.
>
>     Thanks for that info. I thought that was the case, but couldn't find any
>     documentation that said so. Do you know if that's also true of JBOD?
>
>      > Why do you want the two drives to be
>      > treated as one spanned entity but keep files from being able to
>     span the
>      > two?
>
>     I knew someone would bite. Because that's what I want it to do. :)
>
>     If files don't span drives, then each single drive is still simply that
>     - a single drive, with all the simplicity that implies.
>
>     And since 1.n TB drives are both cheap and readily available, and the
>     biggest files I generally deal with at home are 4.n GB, by the time I
>     have less than 4 GB on any single drive it's time to expand.
>
>
>      > On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 11:58 AM, Lori Reed
>     <lorireed at lightning-rose.com <mailto:lorireed at lightning-rose.com>
>      > <mailto:lorireed at lightning-rose.com
>     <mailto:lorireed at lightning-rose.com>>> wrote:
>      >
>      >     Has anyone run across a file browser that could treat two or
>     more drives
>      >     (mount points, actually) as a single entity similar to JBOD but
>      >     guaranteeing that no single file will ever span drives?
>      >
>      >     Or how about software that would allow two or more external
>     drives to be
>      >     mounted with a single mount point in a JBOD fashion?
>      >
>      >     Either nothing like that currently exists, or my Google-Fu
>     has failed
>      >     completely.
>      >
>      >     I have need of and am considering writing such a file
>     browser, but I'm
>      >     not sure I'm all that ambitious at the moment.
>      >
>      >     Lori