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you mean Like this? or even closer?

it's not QUITE a modular pop-open product, but it's close to what you're asking for. the price point is admittedly a bit prohibitive for the low-end, but for the ease of use involved it's not insane.

I can imagine a world where every drive manufacturer comes out with their own module form factor, similar, but different enough to not be interoperable. hell, there are already a zillion types of raid drive "modules" for all the arrays out there already.

you mean Like this? or even closer?

it's not QUITE a modular pop-open product, but it's close to what you're asking for. the price point is admittedly a bit prohibitive for the low-end, but for the ease of use involved it's not insane.

I can imagine a world where every drive manufacturer comes out with their own module form factor, similar, but different enough to not be interoperable. hell, there are already a zillion types of raid drive "modules" for all the arrays out there already.

I've been using ArcoIDE's hardware RAID (real hardware RAID! no software drivers!) for years, and my latest SFF PC machine has two 2.5" drives sitting in a 3.5" bay on top of their MicroRAID controller. Small, quiet, reliable ... this is a no brainer! The only drawback is that current affordable 2.5" drives run around 80-100 GB, so you can't do the 250 GB monster video setups. Personally 80 GB is plenty for me.

I've been using ArcoIDE's hardware RAID (real hardware RAID! no software drivers!) for years, and my latest SFF PC machine has two 2.5" drives sitting in a 3.5" bay on top of their MicroRAID controller. Small, quiet, reliable ... this is a no brainer! The only drawback is that current affordable 2.5" drives run around 80-100 GB, so you can't do the 250 GB monster video setups. Personally 80 GB is plenty for me.

FUD - don't listen to this guy. ATA133 drives work just as well under an ATA100 interface. The 138GB limit (if applicable) is imposed by your bios, and both windows and linux have workarounds.

Besides - if you actually looked around you'd see that their HW supports Drives up to 144 PetaBytes. So i thnk you little 160GB or 250GB drives will work just fine

See more specs here

They also have a SATA version

FUD - don't listen to this guy. ATA133 drives work just as well under an ATA100 interface. The 138GB limit (if applicable) is imposed by your bios, and both windows and linux have workarounds.

Besides - if you actually looked around you'd see that their HW supports Drives up to 144 PetaBytes. So i thnk you little 160GB or 250GB drives will work just fine

See more specs here

They also have a SATA version

Hmm...the specs say they only support up to ATA 100. So that means we're stuck with the 138 GB limit? Looking at pricewatch, it appears that the sweet spot for IDE drives in $/GB terms are 160 GB drives, and that sweet spot tends to move about 12-18 months to the next tier of capacity. I would be all over Arco Data's products if they could support the larger drives that require ATA 133 (have a RAID 5 now, but looking into building large RAID 1 caches tied together with LVM for a hierarchical storage management system because a lot of my data is read less and less frequently over time).

this might not be the best answer, but i have to mention it here since its kind of unique.

want a two drive mirrored raid that requires no software drivers (works with any os) and fits in a 3.5" bay?

check out the microraid

kinda pricey, but would be neat for those shoebox size cpu cases. and with 100 gb laptop drives coming out, it would give a useable amount of space.

something kind of like this

no software drivers needed either.

i have not tried the microraid model, but we use a raidcase model for a voicemail system.

Install this from ArcoIde.comand install a second hard drive. This will mirror your system on two drives and will automatically switch over to the secondary drive.

Install this from ArcoIde.comand install a second hard drive. This will mirror your system on two drives and will automatically switch over to the secondary drive.

FYI, their RAIDCase is hot swappable, although this is an external solution.

Why hasn't the ArcoIDE solution caught on like wildfire? It provides mirrored disk capability with absolutely no visibility to even the motherboard, much less the OS. I've been running it for years and it's great. Mine is the PCI slot model that simply uses the slot to get power to the card. One IDE cable from the motherboard to the card, two cables to the two hard drives.

And there's all sorts of alarming options -- LED's on the card, LED's on a front panel bezel, audible screech, Form C contacts for you industry types ...

I don't get it.

Why hasn't the ArcoIDE solution caught on like wildfire? It provides mirrored disk capability with absolutely no visibility to even the motherboard, much less the OS. I've been running it for years and it's great. Mine is the PCI slot model that simply uses the slot to get power to the card. One IDE cable from the motherboard to the card, two cables to the two hard drives.

And there's all sorts of alarming options -- LED's on the card, LED's on a front panel bezel, audible screech, Form C contacts for you industry types ...

I don't get it.

Check out the ARCO IDE Raid Controllers ... they build a number of devices that basically sit between your iDE controller and the hard drive and mirror the hard drive transparently.

It's only RAID 1, and there isn't any performance benefits ... but seems quite solid.

You setup the controller with 2 or 4 drives on it, and your system basically sees 1 or 2 drives. All writes done to a drive is automaticlay done on both drives of the mirrored pair.

It's a hardware solution, so it's OS independant.

mm

This link has one that may suit your needs. I bought one (from a different company -- can't remember who) for a client about 8 months ago. It works like a charm, and really fits certain needs.

The Duplidisk from ARCO http://www.arcoide.com works fine in Linux. Given the cost constraints of this project, I'd suggest using one or even going with software RAID instead. SCSI RAID is likely to add a lot to the total project cost, without providing much real benefit, IMO. Use any 'spare' money for more RAM, or even towards a second server!

Jonathan

If you need more ide slots, get an ide expansion card. I have one by siig ( www.siig.com), works great, but it looks like they only go up to 33Mb/s. Should be OS independent.
Also maybe of interest is a hardware RAID 1 setup (look at www.arcoide.com) for ~$230. It goes on your ide port and splits to two hard drives, and is OS independent. It's supposed to work at 66mb/s. It works fine on NT, I'll know how it works on Linux at 66mb/s next week (or whenever the new one gets here...). I know this won't give the speedup of striping, but it I don't worry so much about a hard drive crashing. You could use this as part of a RAID 10 setup (http://www.acnc.com/raid10.html). Also, you should have similar size drives for this.

Mike