Using a bunch of hard drives

[snowguy]

I am gong to buy and setup 30 computers for a computer lab and run them with LTSP. So I'm not going to need the hard drive they come with. They each come with the following hard drive:

500GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache

Would it be possible to take a number of them and attach them to a single computer for a shared file server? I've never used a computer with more than two internal hard drives. Is there a limit as to how many I can connect to the same computer? or is there a special hardware I'd need to get to put them in?

 

[Pinhedd]

There's no real limit to the number of drives that you can attach to a single computer but there is a limit to the number of drives that you can attach to each controller and a limit to the number of controllers that you can fit in each computer.

Controllers that support a large number of drives are quite expensive, as are cases and power supplies that support a large number of drives, and motherboards that support lots of controllers.

Either way, you'll be looking at an investment that might cost more than simply selling the 500GB drives and investing in 2 or 3 TB drives instead.

 

[snowguy]

That's an interesting idea. Do you have a suggestion on how to go about selling 30 500GB hard drives? Should I try to get rid of them on e-bay one at a time?

 

[Pinhedd]

That's an interesting idea. Do you have a suggestion on how to go about selling 30 500GB hard drives? Should I try to get rid of them on e-bay one at a time?

Yup. There's a section on Ebay just for selling bulk computer items, called 'lots'. It's not at all uncommon to see "lot of 15 1TB hard drives" or something of the like

 

[snowguy]

Best answer selected by snowguy.