unRAID

[jrfuda]

Found this link over at the AVS forum. It’s a RAID enclosure that uses a different approach. Its $1299 for a 12-disc capable PATA array (you supply the discs). I think you can mix-and-match HDD's because there's not striping involved. Given the price of some of the controller cards, and once you factor in case, power supply, etc., that's not too bad of a deal (but still too rich for my blood). It says it can handle 5.5TB with 12 500GB drives (one used for parity).

They don't have a price for the SATA version yet.

http://lime-technology.com/products.htm

 

[Mike]

Depending on what you are trying to accomplish, a 'poor mans version' might be handled with more functionality (granted less expandability) by using some of the newer motherboards.

The high end motherboards from ASUS support RAID with up to 4 SATA drives. If you are using 4 500 GB drives that could be up to 2TB of storage (depending on the level of raid, clearly that configuration does not offer protection).

If you didn't need the massive number of drives (12!) and could 'settle' with 4 in the raid set (and then I think you can get 2 more SATA drives in not in the raid set and possibly 2 more IDE drives, this might be a more practical approach.

I agree, the $1299 is very rich, I could at least jusitfy the above approach (as you are getting a PC as well)

 

[jrfuda]

I made the same post over at the MainLobby forum, there's some interesting discussion: http://www.htpcservers.com/phpbb/viewtopic...5096&highlight=