Jason Clinton wrote:

> Are there any good distributed file systems for Linux that would work 
> well with
> say, 10-20 40 MB drives from the 386 era?

You're just doing this to prove yuou can, right?  The power
savings will pay for new hardware.

But you might want to look into the ENBD Ethernet Network Block Device
system for presenting the drives to one system as local, and then
running some kind of RAID across the twenty devices.