So I have an old windoze box here at the house that has all our pictures, docs, etc., housed on it. It's been running fine for about 8 or so years, but lately it's been taking itself off of the network, requiring reboots, etc. I usually upgrade or replace computers before they go fatal......
And lately I've been building smaller "tissue box" small form factor rigs for myself and family/friends. Been building a lot of machines using shuttle barebones PC's -- but they don't lend themselves well to holding a lot of drives.
Anyone know of a good small machine that can hold 4 or so HD's? Current machine has onboard RAID and I have 3 drives set up in a RAID-5 config plus a hot spare. Been working well..... Barring that, anyone know of a small self contained RAID array that supports 4 or more drives and is cheap? I'm either going to go with an off the shelf NAS box (open to suggestions here, too), attach a self contained RAID array to my media computer, or build a new box and run OpenNAS or roll my own NAS using a Linux distro.
Buy an old HP or Dell tower server, they switched from SCSI to SATA RAID arrays on many of the low-end servers. I scrounged one for free with a bad fan control circuit for free. Slapped a generic fan controlled in it and filled the drive bay with SATA drives.
Otherwise, a standard mini-tower box will typically hold up to 5 drives if you skip the internal Rom and floppy drives (perhaps you could mount a slimline ROM from a laptop or use an external USB drive). You could probably stuff a bunch more in one if you used laptop drives.
I'm happy with my drobo fs, can be set up as dual redundancy and is a proprietary raid 5
I've gone the mini-tower route, but make sure that you get enough airflow through the case if the system is supposed to be on 24/7.
^^^^^I see what you did there 
Thanks for the suggestions folks -- keep 'em coming....
I do have some spare parts here -- thinking about using an old tower that I have here and refitting a newer mobo with onboard RAID.....basically what I have just a little smaller, a little newer.....
In reply to Bumboclot:
Now with added Jay-Z & Fiddy:
I'm running a d-link dns-323 with two 2TB drives in a RAID1 configuration and have been pleased with it. Mine is a few years old, and there is a new model that supersedes it. By shopping sales through alerts on FatWallet.com, I probably saved about 30-40% off the standard pricing.
Edit: The dns-345 can handle four drives and is $353 on Amazon.com.
RexSeven wrote:
In reply to Bumboclot:
Now with added Jay-Z & Fiddy:
Fiddy's gonna need a few magazines to get to a 50 shot Nas.
dj06482 wrote:
I'm running a d-link dns-323 with two 2TB drives in a RAID1 configuration and have been pleased with it.
RAID is not a backup, better to just run a single drive and occasionally back it up to the other. RAID1 will do nothing in cases of filesystem corruption or accidental or malicious deletion.
