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yes, I've got three of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/... and two of these: http://www.addonics.com/produc...

All my SATA gear is either caddied or goes through a Seagate Goflex SATA cradle I got with a 1TB drive in about 2010.

An easy way to add more disks to your setup without adding more controllers is to use SATA port multipliers. I've been running a home file server with up to 20 SATA disks plugged on a single PCI slot (4-slot host and 4x 5-port port multiplier). The total bandwidth is limited, but it's been enough for my personnal HD video streaming needs.

There are not a lot of manufacturers though. The chips themselves are often designed for external enclosures, but some boards for PCs exist. I took mine from Addonics.

Three 5.25" bays hold twelve 2.5" drives with a combined capacity of twelve TB.

Well its been almost a month. Technology changes very rapidly, and JollyRoger wants to know "Is there any better advice these days?" Since, you know, last month. Lets see there was Gbridge, PathSync, DirSync Pro, Jake, SyncToy v2.0, Unison File Synchronizer, cron run rsync's, and JBOD in a Storage Tower from Addonics.
Since you know technology changes so rapidly, you'd definitely want to trust your backups to something bleeding new. And "these days" are so much better than "those days".

Is this really as easy as you claim. I will admit to not being familialr with this side of computer hardware. NAS/SAS/portMultipliers/et al... even after reading http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/tutorial_pm.asp , I still don't see how it can be management free.

I have 4 drives in my main box atm:
8G Seagate c.1999
160G Seagate SATA c.2005
300G Seagate SATA c.2006
500G WD SATA-2 c.2007

These are not raided, primarily DATA drives. At times data will be shuffled around from Drive to Drive or reorganized.
The claim here on slashdot is that RAID is not a backup... So then, what is? If I hook up my unused 500G drive - and start using that for backup, it will get full. So I buy another. Now I have to know where the backups go. And if I move data around in my main chassis then the previous backups will be inconsistent. IE stuff that was on Backup drive 1 which used to match what was on Main drive 1... would no longer be the case as a lot of data may have been moved from MainDrive 1 to Main drive 2. So an unmanaged backup would wind up with the same information on Backup#1 as Backup#2 - or you would wind up having to move data around between the backup drives as well - to match what you have done on the main system.

I've read through most of this thread, and I still don't really see any actual answers to the OP's question. Where is the software that can remove the headache of managing JBOD's that aren't raided? Does the hardware somehow take care of this - it really doesn't seem to from the information I have been able to acquire.

how funny, I just bought http://www.addonics.com/products/enclosures/AE25RDESU.asp (build-in raid hardware support) and 2x 500gb seagate 5400.6 disk to make my own portable device for less than 400$ canadian, tax and shipping included, lot cheaper than the Lacie one! I will receive everything next Monday so I could do my own test and I will compare them. I never looked for pre-build one before doing my search.

My homebuilt NAS (not really NAS, just a desktop with an external RAID5 array) just finished receiving backup mirrors from another machine in the house (a Xen box with 6 VMs running). These transfers are over rsync/ssh with no pre-existing file to help with speed up. Only the seagate drives are branded, everything else is cheap. Software RAID5 on the target with about 1GB of disk buffer RAM, single disk on the source. GigE network with either built-in NICs or $9 cards. Ubuntu and JFS on both sides.

crm46-20081217.tgz 478555089 100% 49.85MB/s 0:00:09 (xfer#1, to-check=45/54)
dms44-20081217.tgz 3043217581 100% 16.49MB/s 0:02:55 (xfer#2, to-check=36/54)
mon45-20081217.tgz 464314500 100% 43.80MB/s 0:00:10 (xfer#3, to-check=27/54)
pki42-20081217.tgz 369984893 100% 40.45MB/s 0:00:08 (xfer#4, to-check=18/54)
xen41-20081217.tgz 1546169689 100% 14.87MB/s 0:01:39 (xfer#5, to-check=9/54)
zcs43-20081217.tgz 2496573639 100% 15.32MB/s 0:02:35 (xfer#6, to-check=0/54)
total: matches=0 hash_hits=0 false_alarms=0 data=8398815391

49MB/s = 392 Mbps
15MB/s = 120 Mbps

Not bad for cheap solution that's been working 3 years now. Cost was about $550 total. Check out the Addonics - http://addonics.com/products/raid_system/mst4.asp

From the Addonic FAQ: "The NAS adapter supports only FAT32 file system at this time." Back to shopping for a NAS...

Addonics NAS is a $55US device with a USB on one side and RJ45 on the other. I dont know anything about it other than it was written up recently on Gizmodo

"For only $55, Addonics claims that this tiny gadget can easily turn any USB storage device into a full-fledged Network Attached Storage (NAS) server with support for both SMB and FTP access."

Many of times the problem is not in the CF card, but instead in the system adapter. I originally tried to use the Lexar 300x using the commonly sold SD-CF-IDE-A and the Linux kernel will hang even when specifying ide=nodma and it spits out some error codes. I then purchased a CF to SATA adapter from Addonics and everything works like a charm.

I wonder how often voltage (5V vs. 3.3V) is a factor in UDMA problems...

A lot less often than you think, probably ;) TFA is about UDMA failing altogether, not a failure in differentiating between 4 and 5. My tablet only supports UDMA4 to begin with, so I didn't experience the issue you described with the Transcend card. I'd be extremely interested to know if you see any speed difference whatsoever between 4 and 5 though, as the physical specs of the card seem to max out at the speeds allowed by UMDA4.

Also, I found the connector of the Addonics card to be so extremely tight-fitting that I don't need secure it except for plugging it in, so people's mileage is likely to vary on this. Addonics has instructions on their site for snuggly fitting the adapter into your IDE bay, should the connector prove too loose. No super glue required, but it involves cutting a 2" x 3" chunk of foam and placing it into the space that is ordinarily filled by a traditional 2.5" mechanical drive.

Good luck with that other adapter though.

I can't vouch for cameras, but I created a CF-based hard drive to boot my Windows XP tablet PC using one of these. It has two CF slots, and my tablet's IDE controller supports UDMA. In Windows, you can check what UDMA/PIO mode your disks are in by clicking the Advanced Settings tab on the IDE adapter's property page in Device Manager.

The first device I tried was the cheapest UDMA CF card I could get my hands on (233x 16gb Ritek), and after a few disk driver errors, it dropped out of UDMA mode and the laptop went from ~40 seconds to ~4 minutes to boot. When in PIO mode, it would run in fits and starts whenever more than one app was accessing the drive. Now I have two 16gb Transcend 300x UDMA4 cards hooked up to it and it's easily 2-3x faster than my old mechanical disk.

Something interesting to note is that I can't get anything approaching the speed of the Addonics IDE-CF apapter out of any USB CF adapter I could find. They generally run fast, just not as fast.

Try using just one card, and don't boot off it.
Then, get yourself SATA Port Multipliers.

Since that means you can chain 5 drives per sata port on your host adapter, you can easily get 20 off a 4 port adapter using 5 multiplers.

http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad5sahpm-e.asp

Probably not that far off. Addonics already makes a four-slot CF raid device as a PCI card, RAID 0/1/10. You'd have to use software for RAID 5 on it. I emailed them and they're looking at a PCI Express version. Can you get CF/SDHC adapters? http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/ad4cfprj.asp

Something like this:
http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad5sapm-e.asp

or this:

http://www.sataport.com/

Well, if you can tolerate a plug-it-together solution using CF cards and a PCI adapter, you might check out http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/ad4cfprj.asp. You can put up to 4 CF cards into it, and have them configured as RAID 0/1/10. Supports Linux as well as that inferior-brand OS. You could have a 64GB (raw capacity, less with RAID) SSD for $350 (based on $75 for a 16GB CF).

And if you don't need RAID, then check out the CF-SATA adapter which lets you use a CF card for a 2.5" SATA drive http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/adsahdcf.asp. A 16GB SSD in a notebook for about $110.

BTW, I have no connection with addonics - google dropped them on me in a recent search.

Well, if you can tolerate a plug-it-together solution using CF cards and a PCI adapter, you might check out http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/ad4cfprj.asp. You can put up to 4 CF cards into it, and have them configured as RAID 0/1/10. Supports Linux as well as that inferior-brand OS. You could have a 64GB (raw capacity, less with RAID) SSD for $350 (based on $75 for a 16GB CF).

And if you don't need RAID, then check out the CF-SATA adapter which lets you use a CF card for a 2.5" SATA drive http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/adsahdcf.asp. A 16GB SSD in a notebook for about $110.

BTW, I have no connection with addonics - google dropped them on me in a recent search.

...There is a pci card available that will take four CF cards and RAID-0 'em into a single drive. I was going to get it myself, but I slightly resented the poky pci bus at 133MB/s. In the future if they made one with 8 CF slots and put it onto a pci-e bus, I could then use 8 40MB/s CF cards in RAID-0 to make a single flash drive with 320MB/s on tap. That's a sweet-sweet prospect, but as yet they haven't made such a product.

... just buy their CF SATA adapter and plop it in the HD bay in your laptop. Most recent laptops have one or fewer IDE ports anyway.

A company called Addonics has a bootable Compact-Flash-to-2.5"-IDE adapter for sale here. The Dual-CF model is $21.99. The page shows the adapter populated with CF and installed in a laptop.

I have no connection to Addonics except as a soon-to-be customer.

First google result for "CF-to-SATA": http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/26/the-cf-to-sata-hard-drive-adapter/. Here's where you can buy it, it's about $32.

http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/ad4cfprj.asp

One of them might just work with the 300x UDMA Lexar CF cards out now. . .
in which case one could get ( kernel RAID5 ) fast, reliable, silent, and cheaper than the specialty devices, all at once.

I'd stick root on one,
and use shm/tmpfs for /tmp,
and disk for /var and /home,
and have the joy of all software with no-seek-time ( /usr /opt ),
and it's cost-effective-enough, to boot.

Anyone got one?
or know if they work with the 300x Lexar CFs?
or if/when they're coming-out with a PCIe version?

Cheers. . .

Are there any adapters for laptop-sized IDE drives?

Addonics CF-IDE.

Larry

Don't understand why so many people are complaining about this, I doubt it will make any difference to the majority of people complaining.

If you want to connect your old IDE drive to a new computer, just buy a converter, if you can afford the computer, I'm sure you can find the extra $20 somewhere.

If your old IDE drive breaks and you need a new one, get a SATA card, it costs less than $30, so if you can afford the new drive, I doubt you will have a problem paying the extra $30.

If you want to add storage space to your existing computer and all your PCI slots are gone or you don't know how to open a computer, get a USB drive. Since you don't have a SATA connection, I doubt speed is your main concern.

Finally, if you don't have USB connections, get something like the NSLU2, you can even run Linux on it (I'm running two of those at home with Debian Etch, works really well).

I'm sure you could come up with some scenario where the IDE drive would be useful and there really isn't any other option, but for the vast majority of people complaining, there are solutions already out there that will solve the problem.

I have a small collection of some older Thinkpads. One thing that I have been using are notebook IDE (44-pin) to CompactFlash adapters. There are even some dual CF adapters available such as http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_read er/ad44midecf.asp. Twenty-two bucks. Since it is IDE, the bus still has a master and a slave for it, and you can have two drives essentially in that one notebook HD slot. I think everyone is waiting for solid state drives to arrive on the scene (affordable ones), but most of those will probably be SATA. So this lets you get two 16GB CF cards into the single IDE slot on a laptop, and it runs silently. It is also cooler, weighs less, uses less power, faster access (not necessarily transfer), and they are much more reliable and rugged (the limited writes isn't as much of an issue now). It seems like a good way to patch up old hardware's Achilles' heal.

It is probably a good thing to look into for the 3.5" desktop drives too. As CF cards continue to grow and fall in price, I expect in a few years all my modern SATA equipment will be using SSDs, and my older PATA equipment will have large cheap dual compactflash cards. Some of the hardware is so slow that all I really need is a 1GB CF card to store a minimal Linux distribution on it anyways.

It can be done: http://www.addonics.com/support/faqs/faq-bootcf.as p

At work we have win2K running on a shuttle pc using an addonics cf-ide adaptor
http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_read er/adidecf.asp
with a transcend 4GB cf card that had the win2k image ghosted from the disk drive
http://ec.transcendusa.com/product/ItemDetail.asp? ItemID=TS4GCF120

It can be done.

many of the cf-ide adapters do not have 2 pins connected on either end (I forget which pins they are, but I had to solder them in on a cheap adapter to get our transcends to work effectively. we ended up buying addonics adapters http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_read er/ad44midecf.asp
because they support dma.

I don't know any of the technology of ZFS, so I can only guess.

For a boot loader like LILO, it will need to create a list of exact hardware datablocks to read the kernel in from. ZFS might move those blocks around after the "lilo" command built the block map. Then it can't load the kernel.

For a boot loader like GRUB, it will need to have a read-only subset of the filesystem inside so it can find the kernel image file. That might be doable, but it hasn't been done, yet.

So create a small boot partition on the first few megabytes of the drive, and make another partition for the rest and let it be a part of the ZFS pool (if ZFS can accept a partition, and not just a whole disk).

A better option would be to get a computer that has legacy IDE support with bootability, in addition to the main SATA or SCSI support for major hard drives. Then add a Compact Flash adapter to the IDE port and use a small Compact Flash module to load the kernel from using your favorite boot loader. Or just use an all-SATA mainboard with a different Compact Flash adapter for SATA. A tiny CF memory module with 16MB or so would be enough to load a nice sized kernel. Or go with a 16GB one and have a copy of /opt and /usr on there as well (structured to work when mounted read-only).

I don't know any of the technology of ZFS, so I can only guess.

For a boot loader like LILO, it will need to create a list of exact hardware datablocks to read the kernel in from. ZFS might move those blocks around after the "lilo" command built the block map. Then it can't load the kernel.

For a boot loader like GRUB, it will need to have a read-only subset of the filesystem inside so it can find the kernel image file. That might be doable, but it hasn't been done, yet.

So create a small boot partition on the first few megabytes of the drive, and make another partition for the rest and let it be a part of the ZFS pool (if ZFS can accept a partition, and not just a whole disk).

A better option would be to get a computer that has legacy IDE support with bootability, in addition to the main SATA or SCSI support for major hard drives. Then add a Compact Flash adapter to the IDE port and use a small Compact Flash module to load the kernel from using your favorite boot loader. Or just use an all-SATA mainboard with a different Compact Flash adapter for SATA. A tiny CF memory module with 16MB or so would be enough to load a nice sized kernel. Or go with a 16GB one and have a copy of /opt and /usr on there as well (structured to work when mounted read-only).

Here ya go: a SATA-to-CF adapter from Addonics. I'm guessing it's just a SATA interface and an IDE converter on the same board with a CF connector on the end. So no need to worry... CF will work fine on SATA :-)

Get a cheapo 1GHz box with 3 contiguous 5 1/4 bays, 5 SATA drives, a SATA controller, and put up a Linux box, software RAID it, which can expand RAID 5 arrays (few hardware RAID can), LVM on top of that. This gives you everything you want and is about as cheap as you can possibly do what you're looking for. Share files with NFS & Samba.

http://www.addonics.com/products/raid_system/ae4rc s35nsa.asp

Here is a dual. Nice advantage is that you can do 4-8G for the system, and then a 4,8, or 16G for the data. I will probably do this later to one of my laptops.

You are correct. You can do 5 ports to one in certain circumstances...there are some bridge boards here which will do this. There are some controllers which do not support the muilt-drive option.

I'm looking for a SATA300 PCI card to go with my 3 or 4 SATA300 drives that are currently running on a SIL-3114 controller on my motherboard, I'd also like at least one esata port.

The only one I can find that should work with Linux seems to be this Addonics model with uses SIL-3124: http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/a dsa3r5-e.asp but I can't find it for sale anywhere in the UK/France.

This Lindy one looks like it should work too, but 86 quid is absurd: http://www.lindy.com/uk/productfolder/05/51136/ind ex.php

Does anyone know of a chipset with Linux drivers for motherboards or a PCI card? I'm not wonderfully keen on upgrading to a new motherboard (and therefore PCI-E GFX card, DDR2 RAM, processor etc.)

It's doable, and there's even a product to enable it:

http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_read er/ad44midecf.asp

I picked up a 4GB CF card a while back to do backups on (both a 20GB and 30GB HD started erroring out in my pen slate due to excess heat, so I'm back to the original 4GB HD) and intend to try this out as well.

Downside is that apparently having swap space on the card will exceed its read / write cycle capacity fairly quickly (anyone know what the symptoms of that are? Or if there's a way to check on the remaining lifetime?)

William

USB2 isn't nearly as fast as SATA 300.

So what?

Hardware DES/3DES/AES on removable media or flash cards. Uses a small key token, while the key can be extracted it does offer a level of protection.
http://www.addonics.com/products/cipher/

No, certainly not the 'first' of its kind, I think cooldrives has had 2 listed for some time and I have seen others WITH internal RAID capabilities. Though I do think this unit has the smallest footprint.

Wiebetech has had 2 external raid sata units out for some time now, with hot swap drives. A SilverSATA line with up to 5 hotswap drives and a RAID 5, the RT5, which also comes with USB and firewire.

http://www.wiebetech.com/home.php

They will do direct international sales but I think they have european distribution.

Another good source of SATA and eSATA stuff is Addonics who also have UK distribution,

http://www.addonics.com/

Specically a custom configured unit,
http://www.addonics.com/products/raid_system/ast4. asp

They have the SATA->eSATA stuff you need to do any external configuration. Though I do not believe thier products do the RAID in the external enclosure.

There are also 'multilane' SATA cables/cards allow you to connect up to 4 SATA drives over a single cable. The drives can then be configured using a RAID array based on the controller in the PC.

No, certainly not the 'first' of its kind, I think cooldrives has had 2 listed for some time and I have seen others WITH internal RAID capabilities. Though I do think this unit has the smallest footprint.

Wiebetech has had 2 external raid sata units out for some time now, with hot swap drives. A SilverSATA line with up to 5 hotswap drives and a RAID 5, the RT5, which also comes with USB and firewire.

http://www.wiebetech.com/home.php

They will do direct international sales but I think they have european distribution.

Another good source of SATA and eSATA stuff is Addonics who also have UK distribution,

http://www.addonics.com/

Specically a custom configured unit,
http://www.addonics.com/products/raid_system/ast4. asp

They have the SATA->eSATA stuff you need to do any external configuration. Though I do not believe thier products do the RAID in the external enclosure.

There are also 'multilane' SATA cables/cards allow you to connect up to 4 SATA drives over a single cable. The drives can then be configured using a RAID array based on the controller in the PC.

The economies of scale of the present marketplace, i.e. with ATA133 drives inexpensive and on a fast bus, keep the barrier to entry for medium-grade video and multimedia production fairly low.

Is ATA133 noticeably faster in practice than FireWire 800 for "medium-grade" (DVD quality SDTV) production? What about Serial ATA, which Addonics is marketing as external? If a sufficiently fast external bus becomes common, the economies of scale might well shift to this sort of bus.

If you want to live in a world where people's 'workstations' are set-top consoles similar to a locked-down X-Box, it's your option to promote that kind of a world.

Would a world where people's "workstations" are set-top consoles similar to an Xbox 360 development system be a bad idea?

As to your comment about 'what you can afford,' as technology evolves, it becomes cheaper and more accessable.

My question related to whether carts (data storage systems) are being put before horses (HDTV cameras and HD-friendly lighting).

While I've admittedly not read the entire article (it's really long) I couldn't find much info about drivers. It seems the author basically assumed one would be running windows, which for servers (the most likely place for a RAID array) is a pretty poor assumption. I've tried a number of SATA RAID cards on my linux server (SuSE 9.1) and keep getting driven back to SCSI due to crappy/non-existant driver issues. Thank god for Addonics SATA-SCSI adaptors which work great and have saved me a bunch of money.

It's a nice article comparing performance but without a serious analysis of drivers along with it for Windows AND linux (and Mac if applicable) the article isn't complete. I don't really care which one is fastest if I can't run it on my system.

Does this help?
DVD-writer(!), CD/VideoCD/MP3 player with every possible card reader embedded:
http://www.addonics.com/products/mfr/aemfr842d.asp

We ended up with a server like these rackmounts, with 24 hot swap drive bays, Windows 200 server license, 4 hot swap power supplies (3 live, one redundant), two 3Ware SATA 12 port cards (so no redundancy in controllers), no drives, for about $6,200. We purchased from biz.tigerdirect.com, who were very competitive, and beat any other price I could find to throw at them, and then threw in a 3 year 24x7 warranty. We got 12 250GB drives from newegg.com, because their drive prices just can't be beat. We went with RAID 5 with one drive as a hot spare, so we have 2.5 TB of storage.

Now, this isn't the fastest horse on the block by any means, but we aren't serving databases or working directly with this data, we just needed gobs of reliable storage. I'm happy with this so far.

For desktop solutions, we ended up with a modification to MacGuru's roll your own SATA RAID. We added the internal enclosure from Addonics so that we could have hot swap drive bays. This also means extra bays, since the enclosure reduces the space the drives take up. Also, it's easier to install these bays than it is to screw rails on every drive. O.k., so screwing rails isn't a big deal, but at work, my time is money, so there it is. We used the Addonics RAID cards, which seem to perform nicely, and these 8 port SATA port adapter (scroll down) let's you connect the external array to your main desktop with minimal fuss.

We're very happy with these desktop RAIDS that operate at a very respectable speed - Our GIS folks need desktop access to terabytes of data for their processing, and we're too cheap to buy them workstations. This has been a very cost-effective alternative for us. Hope this helps.

I too have been looking into this. I am looking at buying a cheap 3u case with 14 PATA drive trays, getting 14 250GB PATA drives, 14 PATA to U160 SCSI adapters (http://www.addonics.com/products/io/ide_scsi.asp) , connecting it to a SCSI controller and using software raid. I am looking for something that works with OSX and all the SATA solution don't and straight SCSI is too expensive.

$700 3u case w/ 14 PATA drive trays
$2520 14 250GB PATA drives (3.5TB)
$966 14 PATA to U160 SCSI adapter
$4186 TOTAL

$1.19 per GB

My main concern is what kind of performance hit will there be with the PATA to SCSI adapter. From what I have read it sounds like none.

Just because it hasn't been mentioned on slashdot doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You have to look for them.

Addonics makes such a bridge board here. Note their comment about compatibility. Also, AMS makes two styles here that use the 3611 chip according to their data sheets.

You really should read the documentation before sounding like an @$$:

IDE Converter:
"The converter also supports SCSI performance up to Ultra LVD160 SCSI standard, ensuring maximum performance of the fastest ATA133 hard drive."

ATAPI Converter:
Although the web page states that the converter only supports 80MB/sec, the documentation that comes with the drive states that it does tell the SCSI bus that it's a U160 device. This may not have been on the Addonics website but there was no reason to question the reviewer if you weren;t sure.

You really should read the documentation before sounding like an @$$:

IDE Converter:
"The converter also supports SCSI performance up to Ultra LVD160 SCSI standard, ensuring maximum performance of the fastest ATA133 hard drive."

ATAPI Converter:
Although the web page states that the converter only supports 80MB/sec, the documentation that comes with the drive states that it does tell the SCSI bus that it's a U160 device. This may not have been on the Addonics website but there was no reason to question the reviewer if you weren;t sure.

-E