drive extender alternative?

[cichlid81]

I have used windows home server for a few years now and I really liked it. It worked seamlessly in my network but unfortunately Microsoft killed its best feature in its new release, drive extender, which allowed pooling multiple hard drives into a single volume, it made things really easy especially for me since I was frequently swapping HD's. That and the fact the new OS is 64 but only, the future of my current server is limited. Especially since I am finding myself in an increasingly mac environment.

Anybody here familiar with something similar to drive extender for mac. I really really like this feature and am hoping there is some alternative here on the mac. Thanks alot!

 

[zombiejebus]

There is no real solution for the Mac os itself at this time.

The zfs port being done by tens compliment might allow for safe spanning, but it isnt a released product at this time, and might have enterprise-level pricing.

Nobody really seems interested in creating software that presents a unified logical volume and then allows for some sort of selective / filtered redundancy underneath. Well, at least for the mac.

As for non Mac solutions that don't involve a straight up raid enabled drive chassis, the list isn't huge. there is unraid, freenas possibly using zfs, greyhole+amahi, or purchasing a drobo or similar nas device.

Personally, I have a ton of media and would love to see someone provide a decent solution for folks with a lot of media.

My personal solution to my to-much-data issue was to build a hackintosh with a dozen sata drives to use as a server and I have it doing a lot of drive to drive folder syncing to keep selected important directories backed up; this also houses my time machine volumes. Software like boxee can be setup to scan multiple share directories and allows me to sidestep the mess of having my media so spread out over multiple volumes.