6x40gb hard disks, what to do with them?

MossyUK

MossyUK

MossyUK

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I have been given 6x40gb identical Western Digital EIDE hard disks by my brother. He had them in his van for ages and forgot why he bought them, and so has donated them to the Moss Research & Destruction Labs.

Anyway, I had the 'wild' idea of experimenting with RAID, or just setting up a largeish pointless NAS box. But then I realised the PC i would be using only has two IDE channels and so I can connect only 4 of the drives right?

Ideally I would like to somehow use all six, so any suggestions are welcome.
 
first thing do you have a raid controller on the mobo or pci card?
if the pc you are using has only two ide channels you will need one for your cdrom which leaves you with 3 left for the drives
 
You can get relatively cheap add-in PCI IDE RAID cards. This would let you get all them drives into the same box.

Personally I would by a cheapo PCI IDE card and then just slap the six drives in as mini-server. :)

You will also need to make sure you have a decent PSU in place. :)
 
Or you could always give them to me :D ! I agree with abovem just chuck them on a pci raid card and use as a mini server or sum NAS.
 
Get a RAID0+1 setup on all the drives. This would give you about 110GB of insanely fast, reliable storage :D. (3 drive stripe mirrored). You'll obviously need a PCI RAID IDE card but these should be pretty cheap.
 
Get 2 controller cards (if no onboard RAID):

A 2 channel RAID card with 2 x 40G drives for the boot disk
A 4 channel RAID card with 4 x 40G drives for data

This set up will ensure all drives are on the Master channels, and give you the full RAID benefit. The 4 channel set up will give you immense sustained bandwidth, add a gigabit ethernet card and you have a high performance fileserver!
 
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