few old ide hard drives want to make a raid?

[setox]

i have 3 or 4 200 - 300 gig hds and my new pc is ata i would like to use these hard drives as a home based storage device i don't know how to use linux and i am looking for something simple and plug and play so i can put the hds in a network ready case and thats it anyone have any idea on what i am looking for i have found external cases but just hold one i would like one that would really hold 4 but if i have to i will buy 2 that hold 2 thanks for reading please help

 

[covert24]

periods are your friend 🙂 welcome to the forums BTW :beer:

Anyways, What you are referring to is a NAS (Network attached storage) For this to work right without paying a huge price, you will need to buy some low end parts and basically build another computer. The components do not need to be any type of performers, just regular old parts that people are giving away or selling very cheap. you could even go with a P3 setup. After you have all your basic components (ie, motherboard, ram, cpu) you are going to need to get a controller for the extra cards. Now if you are referring to IDE hard drives then you are going to need THIS or if you are referring to Serial ATA or SATA then you will need THIS. Now linux could be sued but im not really familiar with Linux as well as XP. Basically you could set up the NAS, then unplug the monitor and keyboard and just leave it the attic or basement or somewhere out of the way and just leave it on. im sure someone has a better idea but thats what i am going to suggest 🙂

 

[highwire]

If you have an xp PRO or windows 2000 pro OS, you can do a software raid by patching some files and glue the drives together. The info is from Tom's Hardware ~2004.

I did it on a networked box using a gaggle of three drives plus a boot drive. The drives are a 400g PATA, 400g SATA, and a 320g SATA. I used the 1st 80g of the 400g drives for a striped 160g drive and the remaining three 320g chunks for a raid 5 drive of 640g. (all numbers in decimal gigs)

I don't know what is available for software raid in the Linux world, but this windows approach will work fine. The OS $$ is the main drawback. Also the speeds can be comparable to hardware raid, since the bottleneck is usually the drives themselves.

Raid 5 is fast on the read, but slow random writing because a single random write requires at least 2 reads and 2 writes. However, file servers are mostly being read, not written to, so the redundancy and size efficiency of raid 5 will usually be more important.