🚀 go-pugleaf

Also as an interesting alternative BTW AoE (ATA over Ethernet) has been 
getting quite a bit of press recently. It isn't in your price range I 
suspect (It really is designed more to be a datacenter solution), but 
the technology is interesting. http://www.coraid.com for more information.

Dice wrote:
> j4m4l_$1xp4ck@salmahayeksknockers.edu wrote:
> 
>>> Or decide that you collection of drives is getting a tad bizarre and
>>> replace the smaller drives with much bigger drives, say 250G drives. 
>>
>>
>> Already done.  These 80GB are the leftovers, but still have life in them.
>>
> 
> Dan,
> 
> I think the USB path isn't a bad idea, but I'll suggest a few things.
> 
> 1) Buy a separate PCI/USB Controller card (or two) for this, they can be 
> had as cheap as $30. Because USB is a shared network (and not all that 
> fast to begin with) spreading the drives across a couple of separate 
> controllers, or at least dedicating a controller just to this, will 
> greatly improve the performance. I know that may not be your goal, but 
> neither is something that is so slow it becomes nearly unusable.
> 
> 2) Ditch the idea of using a hub, it'll just be a bottleneck.
> 
> 3) make sure that enclosure has a couple of fans in it besides the power 
> supply fan, if possible. Hard drive do generate a lot of heat.
> 
> 4) If you wanted to get real fancy, consider having the drives them 
> selves in those removable drive bays you can buy, and hook the usb 
> adapter kits to those. This way you could have the advantages of making 
> it easy to hot swap drive in and out, and the USB convenience. It would 
> cost a bunch more money, but it is an interesting idea.
> 
> 5) If you hook it up to a Linux box, as opposed to a windows one, you 
> might want to explore using RAID on them to make them appear as a single 
> larger volume (RAID5). I have no idea how good it would work in 
> practice, but it might be interesting to play with.
> 
> Let us know how it turns out. I'd also be interested in knowing if the 
> Ebay deal pans out. I have two 40GB USB drives, by Microsolutions which 
> use their goofy backpack (Colorado) hardware. It is a major pain as you 
> need special drivers to deal with them. I wouldn't mind retrofitting 
> them with a real USB/IDE kit of some sort.
> 


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