Makoto916 writes "In five years with my current llc.view results from: dictionary | thesaurus | encyclopedia | all reference | the web
share this: as the IT administrator, I've amassed a sizable cabinet of discarded hard drives; just shy of 100, in fact. All of the drives range in size from 20GB up to 300GB. They've all been stored in anti-stat bags, and spot checks of even the oldest ones show that most of them still work. Individually, they're mostly useless for our line of work, which is digital video production. However, the collective storage unrealized is quite significant. They are of varying size and speed, but the one commonality is they're all IDE. What is the best way to coming connecting all of these devices and notion their storage potential? On a budget, of course. Now, I'd never use such an array for critical data storage, but it undoubtedly would be useful as a massive backup array to our existing SAN that does store critical data. I have several spare and working PCs, but not nearly enough to utilize their internal IDE controllers; even with several add-in controllers, it still wouldn't be enough. Not to mention the torment of managing a bunch of independent PCs. I've looked into ATA Over Ethernet and there's a lot of conceivable there, but current 15 to 20 bay AoE cabinets are expensive, and single device enclosures are so rare that they're also expensive. Are there any housewares hackers out there who have crafted their own home-brew AoE systems? Could they scale to 100 drives? Is there a better way?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More: - Read More

Mark