8+ Drive mobo?

[jdickens]

Hi All:
My brother has eight 3 TB drives that he pulled out of a Drobo.
We are looking for a way to build a backup storage system with these drives.
He is in production of hi-def video so he would like to create one logical drive out of them.
There is probably going to have to be another drive for the OS (or possibly run it on a DVD???).

Any suggestions would be helpful.
Is there a mobo that handles this by itself or do we need to go the Raid controllers direction?

Thanks!

J
PS Cheapness and reliability are valued above performance, as this will be a secondary backup unit
PS My bro also has 8 2 TB drives which might go the same path

 

[choucove]

There aren't a whole lot of standard desktop chassis out there that support that many hard drives, really, so you're looking at either a really large desktop, or a rackmount system. Once you figure in finding a power supply that supports that many SATA hard drive connections (or the additional cost a hot-swap hard drive cage for everything) and a full desktop platform behind it, then you might just consider looking into a NAS device if your primary focus is simply storage.

You can get more performance and flexibility if you go about building or purchase a full-fledged server system, but I think cost-wise if you are only storing files, you may be better off looking into a hich-capacity NAS since you already have the drives.

 

[jdickens]

Best answer selected by jdickens.