I'm not a professional administrator, but find myself as the most-IT-knowledgeable person advising a certain small NGO on these matters. This NGO basically just has a WiFi router + switch, some PCs connected via Ethernet and some via WiFi. The PCs are a bit old (typical age ~6-8 years); and the NGO is not well-off financially, so it is very cost-averse - most of the computers are donated second-hand.
The NGO people have talked about buying a new disk drive for a few of the PCs, mentioning how one or the other PC are running out of space. I was thinking of suggesting they consider a NAS; and when I asked them about cases of data loss in the past, they said it has happened to them: The occasional disk failure and perhaps even mishandling of HDDs or other storage media while carrying them aorund.
So, my immediate thought was: Have them buy a NAS. They would be able to pool their storage instead of having to buy a new disk for each station which fills up; and they would also gain significantly in terms of reliability (depending on the RAID configuration of course). And I doubt their overall storage needs are super-high, i.e. they don't routinely produce videos, they don't maintain large (or any) databases etc.
There's (at least) one problem, though: Cost. The NAS itself costs money and so does a quartet of new HDDs.
And this got me thinking: The storage crunch is rather localized. Well, what if I could arrange for them to pool their existing disks, and simulate the effects of RAID on a NAS using the hardware they already have?
I know that distributed filesystems are a thing. But - I don't know how practicable it is to set one up on a cluster of Windows machines which are not on a super-fast SAN. Is such a (gratis) setup possible? Common? Possible to set up without a highly-experienced professional? And would it perform reasonably, compared to the one-disk-per-machine they have now? Would it be tolerant of PCs being shut down occasionally or otherwise failing?