|
I have a bunch of dumb questions. I have an Antec case with four 3.5" bays, and I just bought four Samsung Spinpoint F1 750GB drives in hopes of doing a RAID-5 array. The trouble is that I want to run my OS off of something that isn't part of the array, and since I'm out of drive slots, I need to get creative. I'm using an old ASRock motherboard and an Athlon64 3400+ as the guts for this experiment, and I have a PCI slot to burn. Should I be looking at a PCI eSATA card and an external drive? (If so, any Newegg recommendations?) Or is there a better way to get a small OS drive in there? I wouldn't be opposed to some kind of CompactFlash or similar solution, I just don't really know what I should be looking at. I guess I could do a USB 2.0 external drive, but that poo poo would probably be pretty slow for my OS, right? Also, I want to go hardware RAID for my RAID-5 setup. I need a PCI SATA card, too. Is there a good PCI card that does RAID-5 and also has 4+ SATA slots on it? I am crossing my fingers that something like this exists. Next up, what kind of power supply should I be looking at? I want it to be as small/efficient as possible for four harddrives and my CPU, because I'm going to leave this machine running 24/7. Lastly, (and I feel dumb asking this), but my drives were "bulk" and conveniently shipped without SATA cables or power connectors. Can I buy a cheap 4-pack of these somewhere or what? Thanks so much! kbar fucked around with this message at 02:56 on May 25, 2008 |
#
¿
May 25, 2008 02:46
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 10:32 |
|
|
The OS hard drive (an old IDE Maxtor 120GB) in my home filebox just died on me today. I don't have any unused SATA ports, and I don't really want to buy another IDE drive. I do have an open PCI-e x16 slot, an open PCI slot, and a spare 100GB 2.5" laptop SATA hard drive laying around. Is there some kind of magic part I can buy that would let me get this drive into the computer and use it?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2008 13:46
|
|
|
IOwnCalculus posted:While I haven't had to look at any laptop SATA drives in person yet (only have one SATA laptop and it's already got more than enough hard drive space I wish this stupid motherboard had like, 8 SATA slots. I'd hate to have to pour a "bunch" of cash into a new board, CPU, and RAM for this machine -- kind of diminishes the "ghetto-cobbled-on-the-cheap-and-out-of-old-parts" effect. I guess a replacement IDE drive is probably in my future.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 18, 2008 04:48
|
|
) I'm 99% sure the ports on it are identical to the ones on a 3.5" SATA drive. So, all you would need is an addon card with a SATA controller that is compatible with your system. If your motherboard alread has an external SATA chipset (i.e. some of the SATA ports are not directly on the southbridge) you may need to make sure your addon card uses the same chipset manufacturer.
|
So it's looking like the whole board inside my box is dead -- the hard drive may actually be fine. I'm looking for a new board/CPU/RAM setup, I guess. Basically I'm looking for a board with 6+ SATA slots and a processor that uses the smallest amount of power possible. I'm thinking that this crappy Celeron for $39.99 is where I want to be processor-wise, but I could use some help on the board. I guess I probably don't want to skimp too much, but seriously. This thing serves files, runs uTorrent, runs SAB -- that's it.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 29, 2008 14:59
|
|