On Sat, 06 Feb 2016 14:58:34 +0000, John Rumm wrote:

I seem to be sinking under a pile of spare hard drives at the moment -
typically 2.5" 500GB ones. It would be nice to find a way of making use
of them *cheaply*. It would be nice to build a NAS platform for use as a
backup repository, and for perhaps archiving stuff like films.

Performance is not that critical, but I would like fault tolerance. Not
too fussed about uptime. So it needs to be a RAID setup of some sort
that can survive any individual drive failure (e.g. RAID 5 or 6), but it
can be shutdown for maintenance etc without any worries - so I don't
need to worry about hot swap or redundant components.

A small low power mobo in an old PC case could be a starting point, or
for that matter, even as RaspPi 2 B or similar level single board
computer, but that will soon run out of sata ports (or not have any to
start with). One option that springs to mind would be a powered USB hub,
and a bunch of drive caddies which would be a cheap way of adding lots
of drives if required.

That then raises the question of software to drive it... How workable
would the various MD style RAID admin tools and file systems be at
coping with drives mounted on mixed hardware interfaces - say a mix of
SATA and USB? Has anyone tried multiple budget SATA cards on stock PC
hardware?

Watching with interest as I am slowly collecting 2.5" SATA HDDs as I
upgrade to SSDs.

I use
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0037SHEAQ?
psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o08_s00
to fit two 2.5" drives into a 3.5" hole in a chassis.

A recommendation for a SATA3 add on card for PCIe would be good, as I am
running out of SATA3 ports on my main chassis.

For an old box, I assume SATA 2 would be sufficient because the bus
wouldn't provide SATA3 transfer speeds anyway (I have some recollection of
being told this on uk.comp.homebuilt some time back).

Cheers


Dave R

--
Windows 8.1 on PCSpecialist box