I'm new to the forum and need some advice...

I purchased a LaCie "Biggest F800" 1 TB RAID that went south on me (drive 2 consistently fails even after replacing the drive with a new one). This unit is out-of-warranty so LaCie won't touch it. I had bought a couple of 250GB drives as spares so now I'm stuck with six 250GB drives and would like to take advantage of the potential storage.

What would you do if all you had were six 250GB ultra/ATA 100 hard drives?

• Search diligently for someone to repair the LaCie unit?
• Buy an external RAID enclosure and connect via USB/FW?
• Build a server with all six drive mounted internally and use Windows software RAID?
• Sell them on eBay?

Thanks in advance for the advice...

- Eric

What specs is your current rig... you might be best with a decent RAID card that can handle say RAID 5 mounting all these would give you 1.25TB of space with redundancy which goes alright.

Thanks for the response.

I have either a Dell PowerEdge 2850, a Dimension E510 or an iMac G5 to which I'd like to connect the resulting 1.25 TB volume. But wouldn't that require buying an external enclosure with a RAID card in it that could be connected to one of my machines via USB or FW? I'm finding it difficult to find an enclosure that supports Ultra ATA/100 and includes RAID capability. Is there a way I can use a RAID enclosure built for SATA and adapt it to use with my PATA drives?

I also have a home-built workstation that I could buy two cheap ATA controler cards to get all six hooked up. But wouldn't having all six drives in a workstation (if they could physically fit, that is) put a strain on the PSU? What size PSU would I need to run a mobo, optical, boot drive *and* these six PATA drives?

Thanks again,
Eric

Ouch sorry i didnt realise they were PATA not SATA

You could get something like this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6816124001
It wil support 4 of those 6 drives and maybe your onboard on a few of those machine could get the other 2 going? That card is a NON-RAID device but you can get them to be RAID compatible also.

I was interested in this too. It seems that you can buy a very expensive raid card with a slow processor and a little cache mem on it to run your older drives in a raid config, or you can do what I am going to try in a few months.
I have been checking out something called FreeNAS, it allows you to turn a workstation into a NAS device. So I was thinking to myself, why not get one of those cheap microATX boards with the cpu embedded on it, preferably something with sata/pata and gigabit Ethernet. Get a case capable of holding all the drives (and keeping them cool and quiet), add memory to the system and try and make a DIY Nas device that would be very quite and yet still have extremely powerful configuration opportunities. Then I could just dump all my hard drives into this one box and keep it in a different room. Free of EMI and noise, oh how I hate that high pitch hard drive whine (cringe).
Maybe we could see if Toms Hardware will write an article on DIY NAS on the cheap (with speed, access, and raid options explored).
I still have to do all the research, but I am dreading it, so I will probably wait until the last minute to get all the specs (like what hardware FreeNAS supports, etc).

what would i do with six?? hell i would create a home server

I am interested in something similar, but with better results:

I have five or more 80GB PATA (Not SATA) HDDs.

I need an external enclosure where can fit. I will use Raid0 (Not Raid5), since the purpose is to store temporal huge amount of GB at high speed.

Because of this i need fast speed port like eSata_II and obviously a PCI_eSata_II controller (not PCI-X nor PCIe), but since not all PCs will be able to mount eSataII, also need USB port on enclosure.

Now USB3.0 is at market and PCI USB3.0 (much faster than USB2.0 and USB1.x) is available, why Raid external enclosures can have both: eSata and USB3.0 (Yes, 3.0 not just only USB2.0)?

I need someone tell me where i can buy one of such enclosures. I need to speed up the actual 600MB per second sustained write speed i use; it's too slow when managing files bigger than 30GB per file.

To get more than 600MB/s I need more than two SataII ports working on Raid0, if it is possible 5 ports would do the trick: 5*300MB/s=1500MB/s about double of actual sustained rate i have.

All just for that: Speed up. More stripes, more speed.

But i know something with Motherboards, they have a limit, i mean thay can manage upt to some value of GB/s.

What i don't know is how up tis such value.

I have more than one PC so i need some sort of solution that makes me put inside the less possible things, for example, just an eSata / eUSB3.0 controller; why? Simple, i want to use the enclosure with any PC.

I know i would be able to use it only with one PC at a time.

Is there any way to use it with more than one PC at a time? Yes, network; but speed is sick. I want more than 10gbit/s sustained speed.

I want to be able to read, modify (encrypt on some way / process / etc...) and write files of 30GB, all I/O in less than fourty seconds. Speed, speed and speed.

Why i dont ask for security like Raid5, because its temporal data, not all of this data would be stored for long days, only for a fee days.

The important data i copy it on three independent external enclosures, each with it's own disk.
How: Never have all three powered on at the same time, first sync two of them, then power off one, then power on the third, then sync both, then power off the last powered on, then repower on the one was powered off, then resync, so all three have the same data (different file systems like NTFS, XFS, etc are used, so Raid1 is not useable).

This is why i ask only for Raid0, just speed and speed.

Thanks, any help would be wellcome.

P.D: Please also answer to eMail "z 6 6 6 z z 6 6 6 z" (without spaces) on "terra.es".