Maximum PC

Ok with WHS future looking bleak and a problem my HP server is having with green drives (in a eSATA box) I'm looking to make a change. I will set up a windows 7 box to be my movie server (using mymovies). But I have a large collection that I will have to move over. How do I set up a movie folder on the machine and have it span over several hard drives? WHS would just add to the storage pool. Can I extend a folder ( I remember being able to do this on server 2003 where you can add space to a folder from another drive).

I have also seen that windows 7 has library. And you can add different folders to a library. Not sure if you can point clients to a library or not. But I know my collection will have to be across serveral drives. I currently have 8 2tb drives (I do have duplication running).

Of course I'm not sure about being able to back up my movies files in case a hard drive goes bad... The big Drobo is just out of my budget right now.

Any thoughts on this?

I remember being able to map a drive to a specific folder, instead of a drive letter, in XP (never actually tried it), but didn't see the option in 7.

It looks like there's an "Extend Volume" option on the right-click menu when you click on a drive in "Computer Management" (I wasn't able to try it though).

You can make a symbolic link to folders.

I use this to organize my zinio downloaded magazines. There's no way to configure the folders, and I wanted them on my "D:" drive which had more room than the boot "C:" drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link


Since I use autoit extensively for my home scripting, I use a one liner statement there to enable links.
e.g. FileCreateNTFSLink ( "c:\temp", "d:\xtraspace\temporary")

Unlike a shortcut, applications will see c:\temp as a real folder. Files placed in there will show up in d:\xtraspace\temporary.

I think what I'm looking to do is right here off this link:
http://www.mymovies.dk/forum.aspx?g=posts&t=18799