I know you all have been scouting and finding all kinds of cool tech tools. Well here is one for you and just point me in the right direction.
I have quite literally two stacks of 120 to 200 gig drives that I want to put 5-6 of them in some sort of an enclosure that is network aware. I want to stick this thing with the drives into a closet where I have a network switch so that I can access this storage as needed. I want to be able to mount lets say 5 drives in this thing and then plug it into the network and walkaway. I am open for suggestions this thing does not need to be fancy and I really don’t want to build another PC just to stick a stack of drives in.
You and me both brother!
Don’t think your going to have much choice..
Here’s what I did for a solution (network media server). I used a old 350mhz celeron PC that I found at the dump, dremeled the case and added rails (coathangers) to support around 12 drives, loaded it with drives, then loaded it with cheap USB 2.0 PCI cards ($9 each), then used USB to IDE adaptors to load it with more drives ($13ea at PcMicro), and put in a super-flower 520W PS (Directron was selling the power supply for $38).. It’s got 8 drives in it now.. Running linux on it (easy to create symbolic links across volumes so you can hold files in multiple directories on multiple drives and tell your software only to look in one directory for a certain type of file).
It may not be ellegant, but it was cheap and it works..
I also picked up two 3 1/2 bay external IDE/power adaptors and stuck them in the floppy drive bays for quickly swapping drives in and out of my hacked Apex AD-660 DVD player (running the sampo firmware). I have a wireless videosender, but it doesn’t work as well as the dvd player when watching movies on the unconnected TV’s.
whoops meant hard links with linux, I get the two mixed up sometimes..
Try NASLite at http://www.serverelements.com. I have it running on an old AMD800 system with 128MB SDRAM. I boot it from the floppy, and you can put up to 4 HDD’s in it. The floppy based versions are free. It automatically sets up the drives and shares them on the network. You don’t have to have keyboard, mouse or monitor on it after initial set up. You can log into it with a terminal program to do anything you want with it once it is up and running.
If you aren’t too concerned about appearance, there is a much easier way, IMO.
If you have an extra case with an extra PSU, you can put the HDs in the extra case, alter the psu so that the switch works in tandem with the one on your main computer and then use long ide or sata cables.
Most people overlook how much heat several HDs can add to a case. It can cause all sorts of problems. Doing it this way, isolates the heat from the HDDs and allows your PC to have optimal airflow. Plus, you preserver the faster bandwidth instead of going over a network / usb.