Virtual Disk The Network Storage Sharing System

Abstract

When it comes to storage capacity of a personal computer (PC) no matter how much space is available we tend to always fill it up to the brim somehow, and are always complaining that the storage space is too small even to store a vital operating system file. In PCs the main storage method is the magnetic disk or the hard disk which nowadays comes in various sizes and capacities ranging from 20 GB to 200 GB, and there was a time when people were happy with their 5Mb hard disks. Many of the today’s application software that runs on PCs tend to use so much space to store their output. Most multimedia applications will easily create files that are even few gigabytes large in split seconds. All these add up so we always run out of disk space! This document describes a system, a tool, which can be used to share storage on a Local Area Network (LAN) of PCs that runs Windows XP thus creating a logical storage. A LAN can have many nodes with different amounts of disk space. Some may use only small amounts of its entire disk space while some may use its entire disk and is looking for more. The proposed system addresses this by seamless sharing of the extra space available on nodes to create a virtual storage known as the Virtual Disk (VD) that can be used by any user in the network that uses this tool.