Actually, Kalos, if I read your original posts correctly, JBOD is not exactly what you want since it assumes all the disks are connected at the same time. It seems like what you want is more like a disk catalog that represents the contents of physically un-attached disks as if they were still attached to the machine.
I used to work for a company that made a product like this back in the Windows 98 days. It added a "catalog" item to My Computer, and the contents of all removable disks remained browsable. If you tried to open one of the files from the virtual catalog, it prompted you to insert the disk on which it was stored.
It was an excellent product, but they were never able to market it and so it died. Remember kids, rule #1 of the software biz is that marketing trumps technology EVERY TIME.
We have a thread here (one of the largest and longest running) about designing the "ultimate" note taking application. I think we might be headed for the same thing on the "ultimate disk cataloging application". I've seen
other posts about this topic recently.
It seems like there might be some consensus on what this thing would look like:
- Virtual library - disk contents should be browsable when disks are not connected.
- High performance is key
- Must be able to handle massive catalogs without bogging down (cannot rely on loading the entire catalog into memory.)
- Integrated into Explorer so there is no new interface to learn
- Provides smart caching of files written to the virtual library (cahced locally until remote media becomes available?)
- Can represent disconnected disks either as a single volume or as multiple volumes.
- Must index compressed archive contents, not just the archive files themselves.
I can say this: some of these technical challenges are not trivial. This kind of program is not something one guy is going to code up in a weekend.
