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Sata 2 spec is cool with that. It allows for port multipliers(Warning, I do not know that brand. It may be crap, it may be gold. It's just the first thing I found). However: during the 10 sec Google quest I found some chipsets have trouble with it. Intel was quoted as having trouble with it.

Did they deprecate drive multiplexors in SATA?

http://www.cooldrives.com/cosapomubrso.html

For some reason I always hear people trying to scare me away from using these. Something about the driver support being unreliable, but I don't know why that should be. For mechanical drives there ought to be plenty of bandwidth to go around to enable a shared channel to work well enough.

On the other hand, USB always expects this kind of stars-with-stars topology.

I was excited about building an active SATA multiplexer... but this is just dumb. I did something similar a long time ago with IDE drives; instead of powering one drive down I had the switch attached to jumper positions so that the switch controlled master/slave.

Sata Hub (but not a switch)-> http://www.cooldrives.com/sahub5muussi.html

Either way, it's a cool little piece of hardware. I'm just not quite sure what I could use it for.

I think it's pretty much a ethernet-to-USB bridge. So it's probably pretty useful for any USB device you've wanted to network-enable.

Personally, I've got a TV I'd love to stream video to from my PC on the other end of the apartment. It's too far for any sort of display cable, but not too far for ethernet.

Looks like, in theory, you could hook up one of these wall-warts to something like this.

Yes Most SATA hosts will support this, some older ones might not.

SATA wasn't an option on our computer. These are low-power embedded systems, so they tend to lag a bit with some of the newer interfaces.

Do adapters work?

I've seen SATAII hubs before.

Here's one that I found with a couple seconds of googling: http://www.cooldrives.com/sahub5muussi.html

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.

The best reference would be the official Solaris Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). But here is a piece of advice: the whole family of nVidia nForce chipsets is generally well supported by Solaris: any motherboard based on the nForce 4, nForce 500 (and maybe nForce 600) chipset should work flawlessly with Solaris, that includes probably more than half of the market of entry-level and mid-range motherboards. In my case I wanted a cheap, low-power, GbE-enabled fileserver capable of serving files over NFS at a throughput of 70-80% of the bandwidth of a GbE link. So I bought the most inexpensive nForce 4 mobo I found on newegg, with on-board GbE (even entry-level GbE controllers are easily capable of saturating a GbE link nowadays), and with a socket 754 (so I could use it with a low-power 25W Turion processor).

Regarding the SATA controller to use, I would recommend you either the Marvell 88SXxxxx family (such as the 88SX6081: 8-port, PCI-X, about $100), or the Silicon Image 3124 (4 ports, PCI-X, about $60), or an AHCI compatible controller (such as the built-in SATA controller found in modern Intel chipsets: ICH6, ICH7, etc, but you will need to use recent OpenSolaris builds: "Nevada B56" and up). Solaris supports SATA hotplug for these 3 families of SATA controllers.

I kept the list of what I bought 3 months ago:

If you buy this today, prices would be even lower ! I would feel jealous of you having a setup cheaper than mine :-)

Depends on needed storage space. If you need more than 1-3 TB, you can't use generic components, price goes up and hardware starts taking more space than dedicated NAS box. Or Tyan 2U-4U boxes are DIY in your country.

With the Via config and the Supermicro drive cages I outlined in my post, you can effectively have 15 drives in a medium tower case. The case and basic components will run you around $250 - 300 US. All that remains is your distro of choice and the HDDs. Grab FreeNAS and 15 1TB HGST drives and you now have a 14TB fileserver.

My main complaint about the Via reference boards is that few of them come with GB ethernet. I usually add a GB ethernet to the single PCI slot. I'd go with an AMD or Intel, but the lack of features and price tend to put me off. The use of SATA port multipliers aleviates the need for HW Raid.

BBH

References
http://www.cooldrives.com/cosapomubrso.html
http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/m obilerack/CSE-M35T-1.cfm

Despite all the jokes about pr0n and large amounts of storage, my MythTV system is testament that that's not necessarily so. High-definition recordings take about 7.5GB per hour and I can record four at once (two from cable over FireWire and two from ATSC over-the-air).

One of the two RAID arrays I devote to MythTV recordings is built around a 16 drive-bay 4U server case with a quad-core processor and RocketRAID 2240 controller card (just for JBOD; I use software RAID 6) inside. The bays are all full in terms of physical disks and almost so in terms of data, and I'm thinking about building another array. I neither need nor want another full-fledged server, though; the 16-bay server already has plenty of leftover horsepower and internal-bus bandwidth. I really just need a box with empty drive bays, ideally at least eight.

Am I correct in believing that I could get an eight-bay enclosure, put another RocketRAID 2240 (or something cheaper if possible; I don't need the hardware-RAID functionality) in the 16-bay server, connect the server and enclosure with two multiband SATA/"Infiniband" cables, and be up and running with capacity left over on the card for another such enclosure add-on down the road?

A quick google search would bring up the stuff you need. I use http://www.cooldrives.com/noname.html It's relatively inexpensive and sufficient for most home, home business, small business use.

I've been trying to get my manager to get one as an intermediate to the high end RAID and Tape backup we have so that we can backup some less critical, but useful data without wasting $100 tapes on daily changes. Plus restoring terabytes from tapes takes much longer than restoring from disk. The extrenal disk can also be used immediately as a temporary share while the full blown high end RAID is rebuilt. While it won't perfom as well as a SCSI or fibre channel RAID, for ~$2000, as an intermediate terabyte storage unit this is not bad. It will reduce total downtime when the high end RAID is being rebuilt, or when recovering from tape.

Um... Except that you can plug multiple drives into a single SATA2 controller port, using a hub or fan-out connector. SATA2's theoretical max rate is much higher than FireWire800, which allows you to plug in more drives before hitting the cap.

Here is one example of a SATA2 (eSATA) hub.

I have an older (but not too old) dual G-5 Mac. Nice box, and still very relevent speed/performance-wise.

I found out last year, after purchasing 2 150GB Raptor drives, that the older G-5's don't support the newer SATA drives. You can Google on the subject for more info, but suffice it to say that Raptors & older G-5 Macs are by no means a guaranteed thing. It seems to work for some, but many find it highly unreliable. As it turns out, the Mac chipset doesn't fully support the SATA standard, and thus doesn't support some of the newer drives coming out.

After cursing Steve Jobs and his short-sighted engineers, I stopped staring at my expensive, unusable drives, and did some research, eventually opting to go the eSATA route by purchasing a 4-port Firmtek eSATA card. After all, I'm a Mac owner these days, and historically the mantra of the Mac owners is "If something doesn't work as it should, throw more money at it". And so I did. But it was a good decision to make - This card's pretty amazing, and lets me boot off my Raptors, rather than making me reply on the slower drives inside the Mac. Additionally, you can combine multiple cards to run even more drives, if needed.

I admit that the vendors don't make it easy to get up to speed on eSATA though. Too many offer competing products, with various external connectors and terms (SATA, SATA II, eSATA, external SATA). Some vendors are also selling eSATA to SATA adapters. I appreciate consumers having choices, but would rather see a vendor specialize in one area, rather than trying to sell something for every possible option, when it comes to this kinda stuff.

After settling on a eSATA adapter, I took a quick trip to Cooldrives to get a nice external case, and voila! In my situation, it's allowed me to avoid the upgrade cycle for a few more years by letting me take advantage of the latest in drives, without requiring me to upgrade to a newer, more-compatible Mac. And the performance... Let's just say that my Mac's never been faster.

A quick Google shows no such thing as a Firewire to USB adapter. Apparently this isn't feasible according to an article I saw via the Google. The only such adapter I saw via a Google is some thing designed to convert digital video signals from Firewire to USB.

I don't think there's any easy way to get large numbers of IDE drives in an external enclosure except of course for single or dual drives in USB enclosures. First, IDE is intended for internal use, much like SATA - except SATA being a serial protocol, you can find a way to extend that. IDE is parallel, which doesn't go very far. You can find PC towers with ten bays like this one . Then all you need is some mounting kits if your drives are 3.5" to fit them into the 5.25" bays.

Your other issue with trying to use an external enclosure for IDE drives is how to control them - you'd need ten USB connectors at least, or some way to fan the ports in like eSATA can. I don't think there are very many enclosures set up for IDE like that - most are for eSATA.

You CAN get stuff like Firewire to IDE enclosures like this one. That might do for your needs. Or this USB for IDE four-bay enclosure.

But most of the big enclosures I see via Google are for eSATA. eSATA is designed for this - IDE never was.

E-sata, usb, and firewire cases let you use the drive on a lots of differnt type of systems
this one work with sata dirves and it has a OXFORD 924 chip set
http://www.cooldrives.com/esata-firewire-800-enclo sure-case-external.html

also firewire 400 is faster then usb 2.0 as it has less cpu over head.

My setup is as follows:

Dual-P3 1Ghz
1GB of RAM
4x250GB SATA - Linux Software RAID5 - New array
2x160 SATA - Linux Software RAID1 - Old Array

The neat part is the external SATA. I planned this for about a year and waited till all the parts came to the right price point:

The 4-250GB drives are in one of these:
http://www.cooldrives.com/icqudrmusaen.html

Connected to my 4-port SATA adapter using one of these:

http://www.cooldrives.com/seatamcasaii1.html
and one of these
http://www.cooldrives.com/sata-multilane-pci-adapt er-bracket.html

The raid card is a cheap rocketraid 1640. I'm not a fan of the halfass raid that is thrown on the low-end SATA cards but I needed the ports.

My next step is to add another configuration similar to this one in the same server.

My setup is as follows:

Dual-P3 1Ghz
1GB of RAM
4x250GB SATA - Linux Software RAID5 - New array
2x160 SATA - Linux Software RAID1 - Old Array

The neat part is the external SATA. I planned this for about a year and waited till all the parts came to the right price point:

The 4-250GB drives are in one of these:
http://www.cooldrives.com/icqudrmusaen.html

Connected to my 4-port SATA adapter using one of these:

http://www.cooldrives.com/seatamcasaii1.html
and one of these
http://www.cooldrives.com/sata-multilane-pci-adapt er-bracket.html

The raid card is a cheap rocketraid 1640. I'm not a fan of the halfass raid that is thrown on the low-end SATA cards but I needed the ports.

My next step is to add another configuration similar to this one in the same server.

My setup is as follows:

Dual-P3 1Ghz
1GB of RAM
4x250GB SATA - Linux Software RAID5 - New array
2x160 SATA - Linux Software RAID1 - Old Array

The neat part is the external SATA. I planned this for about a year and waited till all the parts came to the right price point:

The 4-250GB drives are in one of these:
http://www.cooldrives.com/icqudrmusaen.html

Connected to my 4-port SATA adapter using one of these:

http://www.cooldrives.com/seatamcasaii1.html
and one of these
http://www.cooldrives.com/sata-multilane-pci-adapt er-bracket.html

The raid card is a cheap rocketraid 1640. I'm not a fan of the halfass raid that is thrown on the low-end SATA cards but I needed the ports.

My next step is to add another configuration similar to this one in the same server.

Laptop HD problems are easily solved by eSATA and PCMCIA or ExpressCard adapters (or Firewire/USB2). Of course, you'll need an additional UPS for the drives.

If you had heat problems, you could get a cheap external cooling solution, but as long as you're able to keep CPU usage down most of the time (so the CPU can clock down), you should be fine.

I wouldn't consider my laptop a "low-end" PC: at 1.66GHz dual-core and 2GB 667MHz DDR2, this system is much faster than the Athlon 64 system it replaced. It has gigabit ethernet, ExpressCard, and PCMCIA, so my connectivity options aren't limited. The only weak point is the hard drive, which could be solved with a fast external drive

I am in a kind of third category.

I have been looking for a RAID solution that can be plugged into my notebook. I would like to have a RAID 0 or RAID 0+1 (but It would be nice if I could get RAID 5) unit that I could plug into my system maybe using a PCMCIA RAID controller card (although I do not know if that is even possible).

It seems (doh, I just made a google and found a possible answer) that there are eSata PCMCIA adapters that do RAID 0,1.

eSATA enclosures have been around for a while. The larger ones tend to have a port multiplier built in, which lets you use up to 5 drives with a single channel. This is the one I am after, but sadly the company will not ship to the UK.

http://www.cooldrives.com/mac-port-multiplier-sata -case.html

http://www.cooldrives.com/sataenclosures.html
I've been looking at these guys for QUITE some time.
Especially this one:
http://www.cooldrives.com/eidrrerasaii.html
Buy a multilane cable and internal-to-external multilane adapter and hook it up. Any RocketRAID SATA card will do the job. Don't worry about doing RAID on the card, do software raid and let it go on this guy.

http://www.cooldrives.com/sataenclosures.html
I've been looking at these guys for QUITE some time.
Especially this one:
http://www.cooldrives.com/eidrrerasaii.html
Buy a multilane cable and internal-to-external multilane adapter and hook it up. Any RocketRAID SATA card will do the job. Don't worry about doing RAID on the card, do software raid and let it go on this guy.

Because that's when I was spec'ing out the goodies that are making their way to me in the big, brown trucks as we speak. I'm satisfied with my purchases, but it would have been nice to hear what others came up with before blowing my year-end bonus.

4 x Maxtor 7L300S0 300GB SATA drives for $120 each from Newegg. (D'oh! They're $5 cheaper than last week!)
4-drive capable SATA external enclosure with hot-swap bays for $250 from Cooldrives.com.
Highpoint RocketRAID 1820A to turn it all into a RAID-5 with ~900GB capacity. $200, from Newegg.

This will all be driven by a G4/2x450MHz running Tiger Server.

These buggers are hard to find for anywhere near decent cash. I've found one model that is fairly popular, going by several different names and brands, but nobody seems to have them in stock. They look like a GREAT deal and loaded with most or alll of the best features of raid5. (hot swap, live rebuild, live GROW, etc) Has anyone seen one IN STOCK anywhere?

Same exact models:

http://www.raidweb.com/fb605fw.html
http://www.micronet.com/General/prodList.asp?CatID =45&Cat=Product
http://www.firewiremax.com/fire-wire-1394-ilink/mi harasyfor5.html
http://www.pcrush.com/prodspec.asp?ln=1&itemno=779 19&refid=1057
http://www.cooldrives.com/firewire-raid-5-enclosur e-mini.html
http://www.topmicrousa.com/combo-205.html

same internals, different enclosure:

http://fwdepot.com/thestore/product_info.php/produ cts_id/657
http://www.cooldrives.com/fii13toatade.html

Everyone I call says they have them in stock. Then I ask them to check and they suddenly change their mind and say no it's not really in stock, (despite what their web page says) and they expect it in the generic "1-2 weeks". (retail-speak for "we don't know when it'll be in, please call back later")

Two of them actually told me they have yet to receive any of these units, so I don't think they've shipped from the manufacturer yet? (vaporware?)

These buggers are hard to find for anywhere near decent cash. I've found one model that is fairly popular, going by several different names and brands, but nobody seems to have them in stock. They look like a GREAT deal and loaded with most or alll of the best features of raid5. (hot swap, live rebuild, live GROW, etc) Has anyone seen one IN STOCK anywhere?

Same exact models:

http://www.raidweb.com/fb605fw.html
http://www.micronet.com/General/prodList.asp?CatID =45&Cat=Product
http://www.firewiremax.com/fire-wire-1394-ilink/mi harasyfor5.html
http://www.pcrush.com/prodspec.asp?ln=1&itemno=779 19&refid=1057
http://www.cooldrives.com/firewire-raid-5-enclosur e-mini.html
http://www.topmicrousa.com/combo-205.html

same internals, different enclosure:

http://fwdepot.com/thestore/product_info.php/produ cts_id/657
http://www.cooldrives.com/fii13toatade.html

Everyone I call says they have them in stock. Then I ask them to check and they suddenly change their mind and say no it's not really in stock, (despite what their web page says) and they expect it in the generic "1-2 weeks". (retail-speak for "we don't know when it'll be in, please call back later")

Two of them actually told me they have yet to receive any of these units, so I don't think they've shipped from the manufacturer yet? (vaporware?)

You might want to check out

http://www.cooldrives.com/firewire-raid-5-enclosur e-mini.html

That's a hardware raid that appears to be quite feature-packed, including RAID5, hot swap, hot rebuild, hot spare, and hot GROW. (I will believe that when I see it) $1100 plus cost of drives. Units like this were in the $2500-3500 range a year ago. Looks like a good time to get into RAID5.

I will probably be ordering one of those later this week, and plan on breaking my mirrors and stuffing five 250's in there. Should be nice.

Check out Cool Drives, that's where I got the smallest USB 2.0/Firewire drive enclosure I've ever seen. Unfortunately, they no longer have the enclosure I have. Never had a problem with them.

Using an inexpensive case like this:

http://www.cooldrives.com/usb-external-enclosure-f or-multiple-drives-4x.html

you could have 4 250GB+ drives in your backup system. Using the slide-out trays, it is easy to move one or more drives to an offsite location. Then you'd have to decide whether to do full backups, incrementals, or a combination of both. In any case, backups are fast and it's easy to move the drives around or to replace a dead drive.

Doh.. invisible link

I put my Sony DRU-500A inside a Firewire/USB 2.0 enclosure from Cooldrives at this project page. I've had zero problems with it too, I bought a 3.5" Firewire/USB 2.0 enclosure for them for a hard drive too, the build quality sucked but that was my fault for cheaping out on the enclosure. They have Firewire 800 stuff to for the high-speed Firewire crowd.

My next enclosure, I'd go to them first, hands down.

I put my Sony DRU-500A inside a Firewire/USB 2.0 enclosure from Cooldrives at this project page. I've had zero problems with it too, I bought a 3.5" Firewire/USB 2.0 enclosure for them for a hard drive too, the build quality sucked but that was my fault for cheaping out on the enclosure. They have Firewire 800 stuff to for the high-speed Firewire crowd.

My next enclosure, I'd go to them first, hands down.

I was looking to this solution for the same problem. I think it can be very usefull to transfer from 1 server to another a lot of data by just switching the cable. Another possibility

PC Pitstop
Cooldrives.com
Adaptec (DuraStor line... a bit beyond your stated price range, though)

Hope this helps!

There are a number of firewire based swappable drive options, like this one available these days for a couple hundred bucks. Drives are so cheap it's entirely feasible to have multiple copies of your backups, one online and one in a safe deposit box, which end-runs the offsite backup (and rm -rf*) complaint problems that were in the previous RAID-5 post while maintaining the convenience of online backups. In my business, we've been backing up to CD since the mid 90's (yay 2x! This is so much faster!) and have discovered a number of discs that have disintigrated. None of it is mission critical, but when we're trying to put together a portfolio presentation, it's disappointing to find that a project you put blood sweat and tears into is gone. IMHO, hard drives are much more stable, and when it comes time to move them to solid-state storage, it'll be a lot easier to copy them in 250GB media units than 640MB media units.

It is not technically false, but it is intentionally misleading, which is pretty much the same thing everywhere outside of the courts.

I've seen products marked "Full-Speed USB 2.0! USB 2.0 can transfer data at up to 480Mbps..." etc, etc. And of course if you look at the fine print in the specs on the other side, it says their max data transfer rate is 12Mbps. I've bought a few of said products anyway, because they were cheap and shoddy and I was looking for something cheap, but always with a little guilt for contributing to such a bullshit company.

On a side note, does anyone know if this drive actually supports hi-speed USB (ie, anything more than 12Mbps data transfer)? It uses evasive language and descriptions, has a restocking fee for returns, and no tech specs available...

• Orange Micro Dual Port Firewire 800 (1394b) controller card:
  $79.50 at new-egg.
  
• 2x Dual Drive 1394b/ATA133 Firewire enclosures:
  $169.98 each at cooldrives.com.
• 4x 250gb, 7200 RPM, ATA 133 Hard drives:
  $230 each according to Pricewatch.

Total: $1339.46 plus Tax and/or S&H

- Greg

> He said his dad bought the card to go with a laptop, which would definitely put it in the $100 - $150 range.

Not at all: $55 on sale, even regularly it was only $70. Of course, you can over-spend on anything if you choose the right brands (e.g. Belkin cables at most retailers: $40 for a 1394 cable? No problem!).

It takes a little effort to get the Firewire stuff working, but it is definetly worth it!

domc

BTW, check out Cool Drives for inexpensive enclosure kits (USB & Firewire).