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Microsoft Plans Gdrive Competitor

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the personal-virtual-bill dept.

gambit3 writes "From Microsoft Watch: The MSN team is working on a new Windows Live service, code-named Live Drive, that will provide users with a virtual hard drive for storing hosted personal data. From early accounts, it sounds an awful lot like Gdrive, the still-as-yet-publicly-unannounced storage service from Google."

2 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Apple by eMartin · · Score: 5, Informative

    In case anyone needs further explanation...

    Apple has offered an online virtual hard drive since the OS 9 days (that's the previous millenium) with .Mac.

    It mounts as any other disk on your system, and even offers sharing with other people from that disk.

  2. Re:Striping? by joe_bruin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not so easily. It is unlikely that they will give you block-level access to the drive. That is, you can't format it. However, there is a solution. You just fill the drive with one huge file that contains a virtual disk image, and now you can format that with anything you want, and raid it with other disk images on other servers.

    As a bonus, you get disk encryption essentially for free. Here is a great app for Windows and Linux for creating and mounting encrypted drives in a file that I've used to do exactly this (on SMB servers). For those of you using XP, here is a guide on how to hack XP to enable the raid5 features that are disabled in the non-server versions.