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

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Apr 02, 2012 at 10:54:35AM -0400, Scott Sullivan wrote:
> 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.

Yeah, might as well just get a nice PC case with enough drive bays
instead and hook things up internally.

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

That's another option.

> >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.

The second box on that page from mediasonic actually does hardware raid
in the box and presents a single device to the system over either eSATA
or USB3.  They are quite nice.  I have used the 4 bay version of that.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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