- Jul 8, 2003
- 9,677
- 3
- 81
I want somewhere reliable to drop all my music, and eventually rip all my dvds to serve inside the house. Reliable, because I've ripped (almost) all my music twice now. I never want to have to screw with it again, if I can help it.
What I've got:
- 4 drives - old drives (PATA), but they match and should be plenty to hold/mirror my music
- an old machine that I could repurpose (socket A/Barton Athlon XP, 512M pc2100 RAM, no raid/original GeForce 32M agp video!); I'd like to stick with windows - my time budget is as tight as my $$ budget, and as much as I'd love to dive into a *nix solution, I just don't have time for a (re-)learning curve.
- A wife, a three year old, and another kid on the way. That should explain the <cheap> requirement.
I've been looking at lower end NAS boxes, but the roundup here a couple weeks back left me thinking there's not a mature product out there for me - and the ones that will appear will be SATA.
My options, the way I see it?
-Throw an inexpensive PATA riad controller into my old machine. Super inexpensive and if the mobo/processor/anything but the drives die, I should be able to migrate the array to a new box.
-Buy an inexpensive mobo/cpu combo with PATA raid controller. Build around that... more expensive, but faster and possibly more reliable? The down side being I may need a lot of new parts... larger PSU/faster RAM - and might not be able to find an AGP board...
Am I missing any obvious options? Any recommendations?
What I've got:
- 4 drives - old drives (PATA), but they match and should be plenty to hold/mirror my music
- an old machine that I could repurpose (socket A/Barton Athlon XP, 512M pc2100 RAM, no raid/original GeForce 32M agp video!); I'd like to stick with windows - my time budget is as tight as my $$ budget, and as much as I'd love to dive into a *nix solution, I just don't have time for a (re-)learning curve.
- A wife, a three year old, and another kid on the way. That should explain the <cheap> requirement.
I've been looking at lower end NAS boxes, but the roundup here a couple weeks back left me thinking there's not a mature product out there for me - and the ones that will appear will be SATA.
My options, the way I see it?
-Throw an inexpensive PATA riad controller into my old machine. Super inexpensive and if the mobo/processor/anything but the drives die, I should be able to migrate the array to a new box.
-Buy an inexpensive mobo/cpu combo with PATA raid controller. Build around that... more expensive, but faster and possibly more reliable? The down side being I may need a lot of new parts... larger PSU/faster RAM - and might not be able to find an AGP board...
Am I missing any obvious options? Any recommendations?
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