[Samba] samba as a block device

[James S. Martin]

Netapp (a CIFS/NFS NAS solution) has the ability to emulate a physical 
device and present itself as a local drive to a Windows box over the 
network.  It involves a Windows client side driver as well as some 
server side stuff to do this.  To Windows, the drive appears to be local 
and not a mapped drive (you can format it/etc)  Are there any 
initiatives to do something like this with Samba?

http://www.netapp.com/products/filer/snapdrive.html

James