One PC...Fourteen Hard Drives?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Will Mercer
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Will Mercer

Hi guys. I have a huge video editing project coming up and I would
like to have access to 10 external hard drives (160GB each). What's
the best way to accomplish this? System: Athlon XP 1800, 512MB, Soyo
Dragon Platinum, 4 internal hard drives.

I would love to run a daisy chain of firewire drives, but I don't want
to have 10 separate enclosures. Is it possible to buy the
IDE-to-Firewire convertors/chipsets/interfaces (sorry, I don't know
the right term) without buying an enclosure?

Thanks for any/all ideas.
 
If you have a massive editing project, I'd suggest only having a day's worth
of video to edit on your PC's hard-drive (so you have max speed to work
with) and the rest on a separate server machine connected via firewire.
 
I run 8 on mine- IDE 1- Maxtor 60, Maxtor 40 (dual-boot 98 and xp)
IDE 2- CDRW, DVD
Promise ATA100 card #1 socket 1- IBM 120, Maxtor 40
Promise ATA100 card #1 socket 2- Samsung 120,
Seagate 80
Promise ATA100 card #2 socket 1- Seagate 60, IBM 60
Promise ATA100 card #2 socket 2- None (can't get XP
to boot with all 4 promise card sockets occupied- ???- any ideas for a
solution would be greatly appreciated).
My overall system specs are a Gigabyte GA-7VT600-L with a Barton
2500+, 2x 512MB Samsung PC3200 running at 400, ATI Radeon 9600 pro, and a
Pixelview TV tuner card. In order to assure adequate power I've got a 450W
ATX power supply for the board, the IDE 1 and 2 drives and 2 promise
controlled drives. The other 4 drives are powered by a 250W AT power supply
that needs to be powered up before the mobo starts. The whole setup is in a
wooden enclosure I built as part of a desk. The hard drives are supported by
shelf railing strips (the kind you put little clips in to support shelves).
Basically they are arrayed in a big stack that can be easily removed. There
are a myriad of fans (10 total) that are evenly split between both PSU's. I
was previously able to run 10 on an Asus A7A266 board with one promise
controller and a CMD ATA66 card. For a temporary project you might be able
to rig up something similar. Before I built the desk I had 2 full towers
side-by-side (one ATX, one AT) with the components split between them- maybe
that might work for you. The Promise cards run about $30-35 and you can
pick up an AT PSU for next to nothing. Ironically, you'll probably spend
more on cables than on the rest of the components.
 
I'd add a few thoughts to that stated:

1) If you need the entire capacity online at any time...

Local file-server for the offline-bulk-storage logical
o You can't easily interface 14 hard-drives economically
---- Serial-ATA is 1 drive per channel (for now)
---- 3ware multi-IDE cards stop at 8, multiple cards needed
-------- requiring Fed-Greenspan to print enough money
---- SCSI will do 14 in a yawn, at speed on several cards
-------- however 160GB in SCSI is not priced like IDE :-)

o Powering & cooling them in an enclosure is difficult
---- a good 550W Sparkle/Antec PSU
---- a very large somewhat expensive server case
---- 14 disks, say 20W each is 280W on HD re cooling
---- ok, it's 50cfm, but in total the PC will need ~150cfm
---- that is going to push you into quiet a noisy box

No point building goliath to win one battle, easy to
sink a lot of cost into a very specialised configuration.

2) If instead you only need part of it online at any time...

o You only need (say) 320GB online at any one time
o So you use a removable HD solution
---- 2x HD caddy's - 2x 160GB online at any one time
---- 8x HD caddy's - 7x 160GB onlineable on cold reboot
o Possible to use ATA-IDE & Serial-IDE simultaneously
---- so that gains drive number if required
---- if planning on RAID-0 for speed, verify reliability

If you can make "2)" work then the cost saving is large.
o Building a 14-drive-online PC is not going to be easy
o Powering it, Cooling it, Achieving the I/O interface is hard
o Achieving say RAID-0 if required into very pricey cards
---- h/w standalone IDE-to-Anything RAID does exist at $$

Externalising as Firewire-Enclosures that many hard drives
is expensive in number of interfaces, PSUs, cases and so on.

Somewhat simplistically, having data offlined also tends to limit
the damage a major failure could have - except dropping the caddy.
Don't laugh, a lot of companies are moving to USB-HD for backups,
yet none are using say a "Pelican" shock proof case to carry them.
Why no-one USA-side has marketed them in that niche is amazing :-)

"Dropping the company" in a virtual world is quite possible :-)

Think carefully and savings may make it possible to u/g the
CPU & RAM, a move to 2GB and a higher speed processor.

Comes down to how you can arrange your data & work.
Sounds like a fun project.
 
Get a drive tower or some other enclosure with enough bays, there's
plenty around. Even a cheap older Adaptec AHA-2940UW would run 15
drives off a single cable. It wouldn't run them to the limits of
newer 160gig drives speed tho. The SCSI drives are a bit pricier tho.
A nice dual channel card like the 3940 would let ya run twice that
number of 68pin drives tho with I think a 160MB/Sec interface.

Hi guys. I have a huge video editing project coming up and I would
like to have access to 10 external hard drives (160GB each). What's
the best way to accomplish this? System: Athlon XP 1800, 512MB, Soyo
Dragon Platinum, 4 internal hard drives.

I would love to run a daisy chain of firewire drives, but I don't want
to have 10 separate enclosures. Is it possible to buy the
IDE-to-Firewire convertors/chipsets/interfaces (sorry, I don't know
the right term) without buying an enclosure?

Thanks for any/all ideas.
Click to expand...
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