I've got 4 80GB Drives that I'd like to redeploy in my house, but my
existing computers don't have any free IDE connexions, PCI slots, or drive
bays. I also don't want to create another complete PC in my house.
I've seen some IDE-raid enclosures, but they are all prohibitively expensive.
I've seen IDE->USB adapters cheap on Ebay (~$12 each). I'm thinking I could
grab 4 of these, connect my drives to a hub, and place them all in a small
PC tower, and connect the hub to one of my computers. It wouldn't be
pretty, but it would be fairly inexpensive.
Given the capacity of the drives and the cheapness of new 300GB drives
($130 or so when you find a deal, even for new Seagates), you may end
up paying more than it's worth for the USB adaptors or enclosures. On
the other hand, you could use those for mostly-offline stuff. In that
case, you could hand-unplug instead of trying a hub (a bottleneck, as
someone mentioned). They may not have that much runtime left anyway.
I know my Maxtors, vintage 2-3 years are croaking en masse.
Also, RAID 0 won't make anything more reliable. You could RAID-5 the
whole bunch of them. USB 2.0 won't keep up with the speed, but at
least you'd have one large volume and you'd be able to tolerate one
drive failure at a time.
Having said all of that, I think Lacie may make some kind of Raid'd
USB enclosure. They had an external 500GB box, and I don't know how
else you'd get there.
There's also a server-type box made by Buffalo. Way beyond the call
for this type of thing, but it's a network connect, so it should be
speedy.
Interesting comments by others in this thread who recommend using an
old PC as a pseudo-network-server. I was actually considering doing
this with some old 120GBs and a couple retired 3Ware Raid controllers.
You could probably get 6000-series 3Ware controllers on Ebay for cheap
and hook them up as Raid 5. That is, if you have an extra computer
and/or if you're already running a network.
