I sort of did this once.<br>I had a machine with a High Point Raid card - it supports two sata drives and two external usb type drives. I then cut a hole in the side of the case and passed the usb and sata cables out and into another tower case. I then hooked up the sata and externel drives up inside the case, added some fans and a temperature/ fan speed controler. i also built a wooden cradle to hold the two extrenal drive cases apart.
<br><br>The only flaws in the plan was that the High point card was a total load of rubbish and never worked right under windows and the Linux drivers were possibly the biggest collection of fudges i've ever seen and pratically impossible to get working.
<br><br>The other option now avaialbe of course is something like the Free NAS applicance available from VMware and running under VMserver beta.<br><br>Dan<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 10/06/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">
David Halliday</b> <<a href="mailto:david.halliday@gmail.com">david.halliday@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Just my 2c, based on what I've been planning on doing for a couple of<br>years (but never had the time/money/appropriate hardware). but what<br>about housing the drives in an old tower (I'm sure I'm not the only<br>person with at least access to a collection of them) with a RAID card
<br>of some type on a small/old motherboard (generally a home network file<br>server doesn't need to be that powerful) with perhaps a small old hard<br>disk for the OS providing samba, FTP, NFS or any other file access<br>
protocol you prefer. then share the RAID over the network. In theory<br>this can sit under the stairs (with good ventilation) or anywhere else<br>out the way and hum to itself 24/7/365 (why for a moment did i think<br>there were 256 days in a year).
<br><br>I'm keeping my eyes peeled for a simple RAID 5 (I like the idea my<br>stuff is safe when hard disk failure occurs) card that i can use for<br>this, similar yo you all i seem to see is RAID cards that aren't up to<br>
the task or ones that cost a fortune.<br><br>This solution also provides you with many choices for cooling even<br>though you have said this isn't an option.<br><br>As i said this is something I've been thinking of for some time any
<br>advice/ideas would be useful. It just sounds to me like the easiest &<br>cheapest (I have everything except the RAID card and disks already<br>including an old dell power edge server with 6 well ventilated hard<br>
drive bays)<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>Kent mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Kent@mailman.lug.org.uk">Kent@mailman.lug.org.uk</a><br><a href="https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/kent">
https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/kent</a><br></blockquote></div><br>