Device for using multiple small drives

Fantom

Fantom

Fantom

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13 Feb 2006
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Hi,

Im trying to think of a way to utilise some of the smaller old hard drives I have, as well as perhaps small solid state drives.

I was thinking about perhaps some sort of enclosure which takes around 10 or so drives which I can connect to my microserver or pc somehow?

Does anyone have any suggestions?
 
Hi,

Yeah, thanks, I was thinking about doing this but need to do so outside of my pc as it is currently filled to capacity.

And Id like to do it cheaply, if such an enclosure, or controller card exists (I could build the enclosure from sheet metal or wood.
 
A new pc to make your own nas maybe. Would be better to connect them all via sata than have 10 drives sharing the bandwidth of say esata or usb 3 in an enclosure.
 
My suggestion would be to sell your small capacity drives and buy new large drives that would fit in your PC or server.
I've previously seen 8-bay DAS units which used eSATA but these cost a couple of hundred pounds. Any external DIY solution would probably involve eSATA plus port multipliers and you'd need a power supply or somehow lash up something from your PC's PSU (if it's up to it). More cost and hassle than it's worth IMO and better to spend the money on new disks. I try to buy the largest capacity drives I can reasonably justify so that they stay a useful size for as long as possible, with the evicted ones (currently 2TB) becoming extra backups.
 
I'm going to try a SATA pcie card and run the cables outside of my pc, this should give me 2x sata and 2x esata so if I build an enclosure for 4 drives I should be golden.

I just need to figure out power, either long cables or a seperate power supply.

Its a HP microserver, anyone know how much I can push this with extra drives?
 
Have a bump on me as this is exactly what i am planning but with new 8TB WD Reds :D
Need enclosure and power options
 
ANDARIAL said:
Have a bump on me as this is exactly what i am planning but with new 8TB WD Reds :D
Need enclosure and power options
Click to expand...

I think Drobo do an 8 drive enclosure, but it's not cheap.

I used to have a 4 drive unit but it was slow (I think it was on of Drobo's 1st gen. USB2 units)

After that I tried a NAS4free server running off a USB stick on an old PC with extra cards to provide more HDD interfaces.

Now I run a Windows PC with Stablebit. It's not really run as a server. It's more like an network drive with TBs of storage.
 
Now I run a Windows PC with Stablebit. It's not really run as a server. It's more like an network drive with TBs of storage.
Click to expand...
Snap.Use this as a backup/windows backup

Got 2 Gen8`s one with 5 drives and the other with 3 atm.Was looking to the future to be able to add more hdds in some sort of enclosure to one ofthe gen8s
 
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