Can we mount multiple disks as one directory?

Question

Are there way to mount the different disks as one directory? Assuming I have some disks with ext4 partitions:

/dev/sda1 1Tb mounted as /store1
/dev/sda2 2Tb  mounted as /store2
/dev/sdb1 2Tb  mounted as /store3
/dev/sdb2 2Tb  mounted as /store4
 I would like to have some /storeall with 7Tb space...

I would like to merge them as a one logical directory, so I can fill that with one rsync command. is it possible on Linux? Which FS should I use?

Thanks in advanced
Arman.

Answer 1

This isn't a filesystem problem, it is a partitioning problem.

What you want to do is remove the filesystems on these disks (backup any data that is already on them), then create a LVM volume set across all four disks. Then you can create a filesystem in that volume set, and mount that filesystem to a single place and fill it that way.

Be aware that there won't be any redundancy to this, and if you lose any of the four disks, you'll likely lose the data on ALL of them.

Answer 2

mhddfs is exactly what you are looking for: http://romanrm.ru/en/mhddfs

You can mount like this:

mhddfs /dev/sda1,/dev/sda2,/dev/sdb1,/dev/sdb2 /storeall/

and unmount like this:

fusermount -u /storeall

If one disk fails you only loose the files that was stored on that particular disk. If your data is important for you and you would like your data to survive a disk failure you should consider a RAID setup instead (search for mdadm).

Answer 3

Check out UnionFS , it might help you.