may H.D to 1 pc

[sahm]

Hi every One

Good Day

I have 6 ATA H.D.

Is there any device that can connect all this H.D. and used them from LAN

Thanks

 

[Zenthar]

By ATA you mean PATA (old flat ribon)? Are all the drive the same brand/size or are they all different (probably gathered over the years)? What are the drive's size (not physically).

Depending on the budget and the number of spare parts you could could recycle an old PC into a NAS. But if you only have the drives it might actually be cheaper to just buy a new NAS incl. drives to fit the storage needs.

 

[teh_boxzor]

^ agreed NAS is what your looking for.

 

[sahm]

Thank you for your reply

My H.D. are PATA

and it

40 G.B. X 3
60 G.B. X 1
120 G.B. X 2

and I'm looking for small solution to use in my home

Thanks

 

[teh_boxzor]

NAS is small depending on which enclosure you get

 

[Zenthar]

How technically "fluent" are you?

Because for geeks like me, an interesting solution (and nice week-end project) would be to build yourself a Linux NAS. You find a old PC, add a 40$ PCI ATA133 controller if the PC doesn't have 4 PATA ports (8 drives ... you will need 1 for CD/DVD), create 1 big LVM (kind of software RAID) or use the controller's built-in RAID combined with LVM to create one big disk. Share that disk through SAMBA, NFS or anything else you would want.

Dedicated off-the-shelf solutions exist, but they are mostly professional and can easily cost 500$ and up.

You could also try to find yourself a home NAS (not cheap either) or look for a NetDisk by Ximeta (branded as ComCast in Canadian FutureShops). What I like about this product is that once you install drivers and configure the device, the network drive works just like any other drive (but slower due to RJ-45 interface).

 

[cliffro]

if using Gigabit(not that he is) Wouldnt the drives then become the bottleneck?

Edit: As long as hes not trying to send and recieve...(something i noticed on a 10/100 network, if moving files from one computer to another, you tried to do it the other way, or even between two different computers the transfer slowed way down.

 

[aevm]

I don't get it. He's got a total of 420GB in six ancient and slow drives. Wouldn't it make more sense if he threw them out and bought a $85 WD 640GB instead? He can just install the new drive in a computer on the LAN and share a folder on it.

 

[roadrunner197069]

+1^

 

[Zenthar]

if using Gigabit(not that he is) Wouldnt the drives then become the bottleneck?

Edit: As long as hes not trying to send and recieve...(something i noticed on a 10/100 network, if moving files from one computer to another, you tried to do it the other way, or even between two different computers the transfer slowed way down.

Since Gigabit network can achieve speed of about 100MB/s, yes most drive would become the bottleneck, but more and more drives are beating the 100MB/s speed now.

 

[Zenthar]

I don't get it. He's got a total of 420GB in six ancient and slow drives. Wouldn't it make more sense if he threw them out and bought a $85 WD 640GB instead? He can just install the new drive in a computer on the LAN and share a folder on it.

But after the 85$ it still wouldn't work from LAN . Depending on how ancient and slow they are, maybe putting 2 in RAID 0 could actually beat a more recent single drive. If all it costs him is a 40$ PCI controller, the end-result might be worth it, not to mention that if he only has 100Mbps network (or worst: 54Mbps wireless) he would be capped at ~10MB/s anyway...