Windows 7 - Folder Mount Points & Windows Libraries

I haven't reached my limit yet, but I'm down to a few unused drive letters, so I've been looking for a way to reorganize. I tried mounting my media drives in NTFS folders, which works OK, but is quite sub-optimal as you can't index them and thus cannot use them in the Libraries. You also can't run chkdsk on them at all.

Does anyone see any other options here? If I mount all of my media drives to letters, I run out of alphabet... if I mount them in folders I can't use index, libraries, or chkdsk. I'm not too excited about switching back and forth for disk maintenance even if I could just give up on Libraries...

If you have enough drives to fill up 26 drives letters...Would it not be a better approach to upgrade to a RAID-5 Network Attached Storage device? (Or even a Drobo would be good.) Then you have both a single gaint drive and local backup against drive failures.

Argh... I don't want to go into this again, everywhere I go I get the whole "why don't you just learn linux and use RAID, etc." argument. I'm determined not to use RAID anymore, as I've lost upwards of 8TB of data forever for trusting myself with maintaining RAID arrays... but the point is that's not my question.

I don't need drive letters but I need to use dskchk or I can't trust the drives either. One or the other requires a solution.

Are these all local drives? Any of them running on the same drive as another OS? If so, my only thought would be to mount several drives on the network to one of the other drives on the network, then network that drive to your local computer so that you're only using one drive letter, but that will give you the other however-many drives were also networked to that one. Does that make sense?

When you get to Z doesn't it just go AA, AB, AC, etc?

Then get a Drobo and never worry about handling RAID or other such things.

No, I tried and there's no such AA or BB, it just greys out...

I could mount by network, but does that enable dskchk somehow? I guess my question is if a drive is mounted in the folder does windows dskchk it whenever the parent drive is checked? It would be frustrating still, as checking 4TB or more would take 24 hours at least... but it would be better than nothing.

I would think any children of the root drive would be checked with chkdsk but that is only a logical guess. I think you'll have to try it out and see.

Could you possibly explain your setup so we can get an understanding of why and how you have all of these drives networked? That might helps us think of other ways around this problem.