Making Use of Terabytes of Unused Storage

kernspaltung writes "I manage a network of roughly a hundred Windows boxes, all of them with hard drives of at least 40GB — many have 80GB drives and larger. Other than what's used by the OS, a few applications, and a smattering of small documents, this space is idle. What would be a productive use for these terabytes of wasted space? Does any software exist that would enable pooling this extra space into one or more large virtual networked drives? Something that could offer the fault-tolerance and ease-of-use of ZFS across a network of PCs would be great for small-to-medium organizations."

Comments

dCache

[Rev Saxon]

http://www.dcache.org/ You will need a system to act as a master, but otherwise your normal nodes should work great.

Re:vista? - DFS

[OnlineAlias]

This is why SAN manufacturers have come up with "thin provisioning". NetApp is quite good it, read more here.

Birth of the Matrix?

[TropicalCoder]

What would be a productive use for these terabytes of wasted space?

Well, I had this idea when I read about some Open Source software that allowed distributed storage (sorry, forgot what that was, but by now I am sure it has already been mentioned in this discussion). The idea was this - suppose we have such software for unlimited distributed storage, so that people can download it and volunteer some unused space on their HD for a storage pool. Then suppose we have some software for distributed computing like we have for the SETI program. Now we have ziggabytes of storage and googleplexflops of processing power, what can we do with that? How about, for one thing, storing the entire internet (using compression, of course) on that endless distributed storage, and then running a decentralized, independent internet via P2P software? The distributed database could be constantly updated from the original sources, and the distributed storage then becomes in effect a giant cache that contains the entire internet. Now we could employ the distributed computing software to datamine that cache and we could have searching independent of Google or Yahoo or M$FT. Beyond that we could develop some AI that uses all that computing power and all that data to do... what? - I'm not sure yet. Just thought I would throw this out there to perhaps maybe get stepped on, or who knows, inspire further thought.

Please don't

[mnmn]

Please do not use the space for anything else. Do not try to actively use the space.

The reason is the obscenely large amount of power required to use the space given a few gigabytes requires the whole machine to be running, and uses it's CPU which can't be less than 21Watts itself.

It's actually cheaper to get a 1TB drive and use it elsewhere than use the power on so many desktops (or worse, servers). Even with the desktops in use by active users.