Support running a storage node per drive easily

[davidsarah]

Suggested by badon on IRC:

Tahoe needs a slick method to aggregate drives on a single machine. Call it Tahoe drive spanning, or something like that. Then I can use all my obsolete drives again. They're otherwise too small to be useful, but together with Tahoe's fault tolerance, it could make RAID storage look restrictive. RAID has to have all the same size drives, or it'll waste the capacity of all but the smallest drive.

[qwasty]

I see people all the time complaining about how their RAID system can't take new drives of random sizes. Tahoe could solve that problem. It'd be the killer app of distributed filesystems.

From what I gather, Tahoe is ready to do that NOW, with some minor technical work. If you could make it "just work", then cut the bloggers loose on it, because it's going to get some attention, much like Sun's ZFS has. I run ​http://www.livebusinesschat.com/ and I can see the potential from a business perspective. If a business could just keep adding disks without worrying about when they're going to fail, companies could save huge bucks. Most of them don't need blazing speed, they just need low cost reliable storage. Tahoe is perfect.

Actually, why not borrow Sun ZFS terminology and call it a "Tahoe storage pool"? Tahoe is a lake too, and I know how zooko loves wordplay.

It's basically some user friendliness that I'm asking for, since it appears all the core technology is already in place. You'd have an entirely new area that Tahoe would serve with that comparatively simple addition.

[zooko]

I think Tahoe-LAFS is already technically well suited for this. Maybe it needs more documentation or another layer of automation? Why don't you try it and post ot this ticket how it works for you.