This is not what elasticsearch is intended for and I think its not possible.
Yes.
Why do you have a problem with this approach? The good thing with elasticsearch is the data redundancy, if one of your harddrives dies you will have 2 other drives that still hold all the indices.
Elasticsearch works fine on windows and I had no problems with it. The only tricky thing that I couldnt get to work was starting it as a service. I tried all tutorials that I could fine but the cluster wouldn't connect. Now I use The NSSM (Non sucking serice manager) and it works perfectly.
I asked the same question some time ago. They both work very well:
Cheers,
defalt