Advice sought :)

Roadie · **on:** June 05, 2009, 01:26:22 AM

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! · **Reply #1 on:** June 05, 2009, 09:31:58 AM

Feel free to pm me for any technosorceric advice mate

Roadie · **Reply #2 on:** June 05, 2009, 11:20:28 AM

Quote from: Mike, Lord of the Spammers! on June 05, 2009, 09:31:58 AM

Feel free to pm me for any technosorceric advice mate

Will do.......

Rob · **Reply #3 on:** June 05, 2009, 04:39:49 PM

What size are all the drives you're connecting?

nuphoria · **Reply #4 on:** June 05, 2009, 04:46:38 PM

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

Flash · **Reply #5 on:** June 05, 2009, 05:13:16 PM

Quote from: Roadie on June 05, 2009, 01:26:22 AM

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 · **Reply #6 on:** June 05, 2009, 05:22:53 PM

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 · **Reply #7 on:** June 05, 2009, 07:54:19 PM

Quote from: eLEATHERMAN.com on June 05, 2009, 04:39:49 PM

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 · **Reply #8 on:** June 05, 2009, 08:54:33 PM

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 · **Reply #9 on:** June 05, 2009, 09:00:33 PM

Quote from: Flash (but will answer to Nick) on June 05, 2009, 05:13:16 PM

Quote from: Roadie on June 05, 2009, 01:26:22 AM
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 · **Reply #10 on:** June 05, 2009, 09:11:19 PM

Quote from: Whoey on June 05, 2009, 08:54:33 PM

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 · **Reply #11 on:** June 05, 2009, 09:29:48 PM

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 · **Reply #12 on:** June 05, 2009, 09:32:01 PM

Quote from: Whoey on June 05, 2009, 09:29:48 PM

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 · **Reply #13 on:** June 05, 2009, 09:41:47 PM

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 · **Reply #14 on:** June 05, 2009, 10:42:51 PM

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.

Roadie · **Reply #15 on:** June 05, 2009, 10:51:06 PM

HDTune results in ascending size order

The 640 does have the better transfer rate but it's access time is slower than the 120 so it's swings and roundabouts really $:-\$

Quote from: cryptrick on June 05, 2009, 10:42:51 PM

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.

Yeah I've had internal hdd's since....well since i first got into computers! New mobo would require new cpu, ram and gfx so that's not a cheap option!! (running socket 754

old school!!) I've found the 4 bay one for £84 (in fact they were are my first port of call for any computer bits) which is a lot better than the £120ish i've seen elsewhere. The 2 Bay one might be a pretty good option, stick the 400 and 640 in that and have the 200 and 250 inside. I may also get some of these or similar to make life easier swapping drives back and forth. But who knows!

Rob · **Reply #16 on:** June 05, 2009, 10:58:43 PM

Any reason why you can't ditch some of the smaller drives and just go with one large one? Other than the fact money doesn't grow on trees. I thought maybe you were going to say all the drives were 1tb+ or something and that is why you were running so many. Seems like the easy solution would be to find a more suitable home for the drives and upgrade your capacity so as to not need so many drives to begin with. But you're probably like me and make do with what you have so that's why I've got a 120gb, 160gb and 250gb even though I'd really like to dump them and get a single 1TB drive. Nice to have redundancy for important files as well.

cryptrick · **Reply #17 on:** June 05, 2009, 11:02:59 PM

Those HDD speeds are fine

especially that 640GB, average of nearly 87mb/sec is bloody good! Don't worry about its slightly slower access time, you won't really notice it at all.

Hmm, you're right if you're running Sk754, maybe M/B is not a cheap option

In that case I would personally go with the 400 and 640 in the 2 bay and rest inside PC but thats just me and what I prefer. That DAS400 would obviously be fine, if you can get it cheaper then it wouldn't be a bad buy by any means

cryptrick · **Reply #18 on:** June 05, 2009, 11:05:30 PM

Quote from: eLEATHERMAN.com on June 05, 2009, 10:58:43 PM

Any reason why you can't ditch some of the smaller drives and just go with one large one? Other than the fact money doesn't grow on trees. I thought maybe you were going to say all the drives were 1tb+ or something and that is why you were running so many. Seems like the easy solution would be to find a more suitable home for the drives and upgrade your capacity so as to not need so many drives to begin with. But you're probably like me and make do with what you have so that's why I've got a 120gb, 160gb and 250gb even though I'd really like to dump them and get a single 1TB drive. Nice to have redundancy for important files as well.

Trouble with that is if the 1TB drive fails. You'd have to have another 1TB drive (or close to it) for backup. But I see where you're coming from, its just the problem of putting all your eggs in one basket so to speak with having just the one huge HDD

Roadie · **Reply #19 on:** June 05, 2009, 11:12:38 PM

Quote from: eLEATHERMAN.com on June 05, 2009, 10:58:43 PM

Any reason why you can't ditch some of the smaller drives and just go with one large one? Other than the fact money doesn't grow on trees. I thought maybe you were going to say all the drives were 1tb+ or something and that is why you were running so many. Seems like the easy solution would be to find a more suitable home for the drives and upgrade your capacity so as to not need so many drives to begin with. But you're probably like me and make do with what you have so that's why I've got a 120gb, 160gb and 250gb even though I'd really like to dump them and get a single 1TB drive. Nice to have redundancy for important files as well.

That reason there is the big one

I'm on zero income and have only been able to get a new hdd cos of birthday money and the external drive case will be a birthday present from the parents once i make my mind up what i want

1TB drives would be great but it's not a financially viable solution at the moment!

Quote from: cryptrick on June 05, 2009, 11:02:59 PM

Those HDD speeds are fine especially that 640GB, average of nearly 87mb/sec is bloody good! Don't worry about its slightly slower access time, you won't really notice it at all.

Hmm, you're right if you're running Sk754, maybe M/B is not a cheap option

In that case I would personally go with the 400 and 640 in the 2 bay and rest inside PC but thats just me and what I prefer. That DAS400 would obviously be fine, if you can get it cheaper then it wouldn't be a bad buy by any means

Yeah I was quite surprised at that transfer speed

DAS200 is £55 DAS400 is £84.......hmm i have to make up anything over £50 so financially the 200 makes so much more sense

And i suppose when i get bigger drives i can still stick them in my machine. I hate making decisions!!!

cgk · **Reply #20 on:** June 05, 2009, 11:15:17 PM

Ah yes "220, 221 whatever it takes"

It does look like your flux capacitor is fluxing.

Have you tried using 1.21 Jigawatts?

You know its all ball bearings these days.

Ok Ill go away now.

cryptrick · **Reply #21 on:** June 05, 2009, 11:17:26 PM

Quote from: cgk on June 05, 2009, 11:15:17 PM

Ah yes "220, 221 whatever it takes"

It does look like your flux capacitor is fluxing.

Have you tried using 1.21 Jigawatts?

You know its all ball bearings these days.

Ok Ill go away now.

Lol, I knew somebody would come along with the perfect answer to Ryans problems. Case closed

Flash · **Reply #22 on:** June 05, 2009, 11:18:13 PM

WTF...seriously I have not got a scooby doo

Roadie · **Reply #23 on:** June 05, 2009, 11:19:00 PM

Quote from: cgk on June 05, 2009, 11:15:17 PM

Ah yes "220, 221 whatever it takes"

It does look like your flux capacitor is fluxing.

Have you tried using 1.21 Jigawatts?

You know its all ball bearings these days.

Ok Ill go away now.

Hang on you've lost me......i thought my flux capacitor should be fluxing......now i'm really lost

Nikos · **Reply #24 on:** June 06, 2009, 12:36:02 AM

That's probably due to recursive traversals of loopback mount points, the firewall needing cooling, or the plate voltage being too low on demodulator tube. You should decrease the electron flux before a complete transient lockout settles in.