Non Raid - Symbolic links

Question

I have 3x 3TB drives and 2x 1TB drives.

I want to use all drives without RAID, but to be shown as a single volume. So that if a drive fails only the information on that failed drive will be lost. Then in turn that drive can be replace with either a smaller or larger drive expanding or contracting the volume. I do not care about redundancy.

Linux.

What can I do?

Answer 1

Mount each drive separately, and use these mount points for writes in order to send files to particular drives. Then, use aufs to union mount all of your mount points together:

mount -t aufs -o dirs=/mnt1:/mnt2 none /union_mnt

/union_mnt gives you read access to all drives.