how to make multiple drives appear "as one"?

[skanky]

if anyone could point me in the right direction that would be great: im building a fileserver for home, it'll have multiple hard drives of varying sizes, i want all the data on the drives to appear in windows as a single share.

ie, instead of \\SERVER\D$ and \\SERVER\E$ it'll be \\SERVER\ALL which will have everything on D/E drives appear as a share with D/E subfolders each containing its contents.

sort of how raid0 works, but dont want to raid0 and it wont work with drives of diffrent size anyway. i need it so that if one drive dies, the rest of the data/share is unaffected except for the data stored on that share.

is that feasible or should i just forget it and share them out as seperate drives to save hassle?

 

[skanky]

it'll most likely run xp or vista, surely i can do this without needing a server OS, unless a server OS will do what i need better than the desktop OS's?

i looked at windows home server, but as far as i can make out, thats to be used as a monitorless terminal with it all controlled by web interface, i need this server to play media files as well as holding all the hdds so it needs to be a useable.

does JBOD work so if i drive fails then the rest still work?

 

[skanky]

oh thats no good then. :/

 

[skanky]

i will need to run windows apps, its going to need to play media files output to a telly.

reading a bit about WHS, it sounds like it could be what im after but it doesnt let me open a media player (wmp11 for example) and play files, does it?

 

[skanky]

It comes with wmp10 installed. However it's really intended that WHS serves the media to a client with say wmp11 on it.

i need the machine to actually play the media file so i guess its totally out.