Advice sought :)

[Roadie]

Well my hard drive arrived, it's installed, formatted and having files transferred over to it......now the fun part begins! Trying to rearrange and recompile folders that have been split up, wedged into corners and generally abused! But I have emptied a 200gb hard drive to be used as a backup drive Just no way of plugging it in yet Only got 4 sata ports and 5 sata drives....makes life tricky! I'm thinking about either the DAS200 or DAS400 from here http://www.edge10.com/digital_storage.php any thoughts I'm not going to use RAID (important data is backed up in 3 different locations, all the data on this will be replaceable) so it'll simply be a neater way of attaching all my storage hard drives to my computer and being able to access each of them independently will allow me more flexibility. eSata would be nice but i don't know if my eSata port can do port multiplying (card only cost about £15 so not holding out hope) but that would mean only getting the 2 bay one as i'd really like to keep USB as it is a lot more compatible with other machines. And the 4 bay only comes in either eSata or usb not combined like the 2 port

So yeah thoughts and ideas please

[Mike, Lord of the Spammers!]

Feel free to pm me for any technosorceric advice mate

[Roadie]

Feel free to pm me for any technosorceric advice mate

Will do.......

[Rob]

What size are all the drives you're connecting?

[nuphoria]

Just remember to connect the knee bone to the thigh bone and you'll be ticketyboo 

[Flash]

Well my hard drive arrived, it's installed, formatted and having files transferred over to it......now the fun part begins! Trying to rearrange and recompile folders that have been split up, wedged into corners and generally abused! But I have emptied a 200gb hard drive to be used as a backup drive Just no way of plugging it in yet Only got 4 sata ports and 5 sata drives....makes life tricky! I'm thinking about either the DAS200 or DAS400 from here http://www.edge10.com/digital_storage.php any thoughts I'm not going to use RAID (important data is backed up in 3 different locations, all the data on this will be replaceable) so it'll simply be a neater way of attaching all my storage hard drives to my computer and being able to access each of them independently will allow me more flexibility. eSata would be nice but i don't know if my eSata port can do port multiplying (card only cost about £15 so not holding out hope) but that would mean only getting the 2 bay one as i'd really like to keep USB as it is a lot more compatible with other machines. And the 4 bay only comes in either eSata or usb not combined like the 2 port

So yeah thoughts and ideas please

Dude,

As far as I am concerned you just said some numbers and stuff.

In fairness I lost you at "Well my hard drive arrived, it's installed, formatted..."



(Glad to help  )

[Nikos]

If I were you I'd probably use up all the internal sata connectors (maybe throwing in a couple of trays for the drives), and add a single external usb cage for the 5th one. That way you get all the speed pros of the sata connection and still have an external drive to haul around. That assumes that the sata controller card is on a bus fast enough to sustain data transfer from 4 sata drives, plus whatever is going around in that bus. Otherwise the 4-port usb enclosure seems like a good deal.

[Roadie]

What size are all the drives you're connecting?

640, 400, 250 & 200gb The 120gb is staying in the tower no matter what as it's my OS drive

As for noth's reply:
I only have 2 onboard sata ports the other 2 are on a pci card, so only 2 drives get proper transfer speeds anyway the others are limited by the pci bus. There is enough room internally for 6 drives but only 4 sata ports. I am leaning towards the 4 bay USB one for the following reasons:
- it gives me an easy way to take all my stuff to friends/other houses
- it will allow me to save power as i can turn it off when not needed and still use my computer.
- i can get a USB NAS adaptor in the future and thus have all my data easily available to a network and if i find one that can work as ftp web server i'm sorted.
- It gives me more room for expansion as it frees up all but one of my sata ports

[Whoey]

I think a swappable raid tower such as that is my next major pc purchase... that nas400 looks right up my alley... I find I have heaps of things stored on various PCs and it'd be great to have them sitting all in one box connected to the lan (preferably not in one of the PCs we're using)

I sort of have the reverse problem with the new PC... the mainboard has lots of sata ports, but there's not space in the tower to put any more drives... (I have made some mods just to fit in what I have!)

You could probably pick up a cheap usb enclosure to put one of the spare drives into... that's a good temporary solution if you just want some off PC handy storage.

You may want to consider partitioning one of the newer larger drives, and moving your bootup/OS to that disk... it will improve your speed a bit... as the larger drives also have more cache etc. that is unless your 120g is higher RPM...

[Pacu]

Well my hard drive arrived, it's installed, formatted and having files transferred over to it......now the fun part begins! Trying to rearrange and recompile folders that have been split up, wedged into corners and generally abused! But I have emptied a 200gb hard drive to be used as a backup drive Just no way of plugging it in yet Only got 4 sata ports and 5 sata drives....makes life tricky! I'm thinking about either the DAS200 or DAS400 from here http://www.edge10.com/digital_storage.php any thoughts I'm not going to use RAID (important data is backed up in 3 different locations, all the data on this will be replaceable) so it'll simply be a neater way of attaching all my storage hard drives to my computer and being able to access each of them independently will allow me more flexibility. eSata would be nice but i don't know if my eSata port can do port multiplying (card only cost about £15 so not holding out hope) but that would mean only getting the 2 bay one as i'd really like to keep USB as it is a lot more compatible with other machines. And the 4 bay only comes in either eSata or usb not combined like the 2 port

So yeah thoughts and ideas please

Dude,

As far as I am concerned you just said some numbers and stuff.

In fairness I lost you at "Well my hard drive arrived, it's installed, formatted..."



(Glad to help  )

x2

[Roadie]

I think a swappable raid tower such as that is my next major pc purchase... that nas400 looks right up my alley... I find I have heaps of things stored on various PCs and it'd be great to have them sitting all in one box connected to the lan (preferably not in one of the PCs we're using)

I sort of have the reverse problem with the new PC... the mainboard has lots of sata ports, but there's not space in the tower to put any more drives... (I have made some mods just to fit in what I have!)

You could probably pick up a cheap usb enclosure to put one of the spare drives into... that's a good temporary solution if you just want some off PC handy storage.

You may want to consider partitioning one of the newer larger drives, and moving your bootup/OS to that disk... it will improve your speed a bit... as the larger drives also have more cache etc. that is unless your 120g is higher RPM...

Yeah the NAS400 does look nice......but have you seen the price

All the drives are roughly the same age (apart from the new 640gb one) so increased speeds are unlikely I am now running off my 120gb drive instead of an old 10gb ide one which makes life much much faster

[Whoey]

you'd be surprised... I tried running my new machine off a not very old 200gb sata, and it turns out the new 500gb improves the performance drastically... didn't look for the price on the nas400... but that's sort of the rig I'd like... maybe not hot swap but it seems all the prices for such devices are the same, basically a new PC... I know I have the parts to build a setup that could run from a flashdisk or similar, and do all the same work with some older hardware, but I'd like a smaller, easier to hide package...

[Roadie]

you'd be surprised... I tried running my new machine off a not very old 200gb sata, and it turns out the new 500gb improves the performance drastically... didn't look for the price on the nas400... but that's sort of the rig I'd like... maybe not hot swap but it seems all the prices for such devices are the same, basically a new PC... I know I have the parts to build a setup that could run from a flashdisk or similar, and do all the same work with some older hardware, but I'd like a smaller, easier to hide package...

Yep i understand it could be faster but i'd rather just keep the 640gb one whole I've toyed with the idea of making a small file server pc but it's not ideal for the rest of this year at least and possibly not for the next couple of years depending on what i do next year so i think this is the best solution for now.

[Whoey]

If you're not after any sort of automated or raid solution, there are single disk LAN enclosures for pretty cheap... (I have one for IDE drives which is usb/ethernet)

But I would like the idea of it being raid mirrored on it's own without any sort of extra software.

I also find the 300gb drive in it overheats without proper ventilation

[cryptrick]

OK Ryan, here's what me thinks

You could go for what Noth suggested and have 4 SATA drives in your PC and 1 drive in an external HDD. For this though I would recommend buying a new motherboard. You can get a nice Gigabyte with 4 SATA ports for £40. So then its easy to have say 4 in your PC and 1 external drive to carry around.

If you are after more than one drive outside of your PC (which is what I think you may want), you might consider having 3 internal SATA drives and get the DAS200 and have 2 HDD's in that unit. I think the 4 HDD Edge one is a bit pricey and not neccesarily what you're after. Thats OK for really heavy network access and file sharing but for home/uni use it may be a bit OTT. I would always have most of my drives in my PC but thats just me.