[Klug-general] eSATA

[David Halliday]

Just my 2c, based on what I've been planning on doing for a couple of
years (but never had the time/money/appropriate hardware). but what
about housing the drives in an old tower (I'm sure I'm not the only
person with at least access to a collection of them) with a RAID card
of some type on a small/old motherboard (generally a home network file
server doesn't need to be that powerful) with perhaps a small old hard
disk for the OS providing samba, FTP, NFS or any other file access
protocol you prefer. then share the RAID over the network. In theory
this can sit under the stairs (with good ventilation) or anywhere else
out the way and hum to itself 24/7/365 (why for a moment did i think
there were 256 days in a year).

I'm keeping my eyes peeled for a simple RAID 5 (I like the idea my
stuff is safe when hard disk failure occurs) card that i can use for
this, similar yo you all i seem to see is RAID cards that aren't up to
the task or ones that cost a fortune.

This solution also provides you with many choices for cooling even
though you have said this isn't an option.

As i said this is something I've been thinking of for some time any
advice/ideas would be useful. It just sounds to me like the easiest &
cheapest (I have everything except the RAID card and disks already
including an old dell power edge server with 6 well ventilated hard
drive bays)