Cheap man's version of 8-bay disk array?

[Scott Sullivan]

On 03/31/2012 11:59 AM, William Park wrote:
> I'm running out of disk space, mainly because of backups.
> What I need is something like
>      <http://ain.mediasonic.ca/store/index.php?cPath=72>
> Does anyone know any company selling just the circuit
> board in ATX/mATX form factor?

The device you listed is just a fancy case with a SATA port multiplier. 
Unfortunately you still need to connect this to a computer.

There are certainly plenty of Fully equpiped NAS boxes that you and 
replace the internal OS one, both in ARM and x86 flavours.

>
> I can set up a backup server, but that requires motherboard,
> cpu, ram, and OS, all of which I really don't want to deal
> with.  I already have case and power supply.  All I want
> to do is swap out the motherboard.

If you are looking to just reuse a case and have the same "just a bunch 
of disks on port multiplier" it might be possible. The major issue I for 
see is that the port-multiplier boards are expecting to butt directly to 
the hard-drives instead of using Sata Cables.

http://usa.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_cat.php?pos=31
http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/
http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/

>
> Maybe I'm dreaming.

If you can find a Port Multiplier that takes SATA cables on one end, and 
eSATA on the other, then maybe...

But what you might save in a handful of dollars, you will pay vastly 
greater in your time.

-- 
Scott Sullivan
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