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You can get a bunch of firewire to ide bridge boards, and run scsi over firewire.
Keep in mind this will be noticeably slower than native ide once you get more than a certain number of drives on a single bus, but for some applications, fast disk access isn't as important.

Technically speaking, you can use USB for this too, however there are many more downsides.
Many times slower than firewire, due to the method usb uses to communicate bidirectionally.
Its not that much cheaper, and also you cant use nearly as many drives per bus.

As an example, try http://www.fwdepot.com/
Their prices are a bit high i admit, but you can build a shopping list there and look around for best price.

4 BUS firewire cards. Note that a 4 -port- card is not at all the same. That will be one bus, with a 4 port hub built in. The less drives on each bus, and the more buses you have, the more bandwidth is available to each disk, and the speed up is exponential.

One bridge board per hard drive, a few hubs and some cabling, and spread them out over your few spare pcs.

Then run something like http://evms.sf.net/ to cluster the machines together and create one giant pool of storage space out of all the drives over all the machines.

It's probably as cheap as possible for getting use out of them storage wise. Any other 'better' solution will cost a lot more too.

Of course, useful for storage and just plain useful are two different metrics.

A lot of others already mentioned donating them.
Just remember to hook 4 up at a time to a spare pc and run a good HD wipe app like http://dban.sf.net/

But there are many options to get rid of them to others with.
Charity donations for a tax write off, local community projects in need of hardware, friends, family, stocking stuffer for the staff, make a craigslist post and offer them for free (or next to), buyer comes to get it or pays shipping, do the ebay dance, etc etc

Actually, the cable length can be much longer than 4 meters. You are correct that it does depend upon the medium of the cable there are certain lengths; however, consider the actual specifications[pdf - Standards Orientation v5], or 1394a & b white paper[pdf]:

• Plastic optical fiber (POF) - 100m at 200Mb/s or 400 Mb/s
• Glass optical fiber (GOF) - 100m at 800Mb/s, spec. to 3200Mb/s
• CAT5e - 100m at 800Mb/s

Of course these are point to point distances (i.e. between devices) not the total length of the device chain which I do not believe there is a limit (couldn't find one anyways). And there are always repeaters such as here, or here if you need even more distance.

Price out some hot swap chassis then.
You won't see any at Best Buy or CompUSA.

Joe Sixpack consumers who buy boards with Intel Matrix chipsets can hot swap, but will the chassis their systems are installed in make hot swap easy, or even possible, without laying a drive next to the chassis until powering down is convenient (I know, it's a home system, but hot swap is an advertised feature so bear with me)?

Even worse: is Microsoft NOT advertising hot swap based on Matrix or a similar RAID-equipped chipset, but software RAID? What about IDE drives? You're NOT going to hot swap IDE on a consumer board in a consumer chassis; you WILL fry components. That would be true of most server boards as well; you need something like this ( http://www.scsi4me.com/product_info.php?products_i d=1236 ) or this ( http://fwdepot.com/thestore/product_info.php/produ cts_id/1708 ) which basically puts a proprietary hotswap-aware controller in front of each drive, encased in a chassis, to work around IDE's limitations. The end cost is going to be more than SuperMicro's low-end hot swap SATA chassis (I LOVE those chassis, BTW, and if the fans weren't so darn loud I'd have gone supermicro on my new machine like I did on my old one). Wholesale pricing on quality hot swap chassis is over $400, unless you're prepared to buy in volume. NOT consumer hardware.

Worst: is this the software RAID Windows has had for years? Supporting hot swap now? If you're running a pure software RAID in Windows on a Matrix or similar hybrid chipset solution, you're a moron and deserve what comes with Windows' software RAID solution. I can understand running software RAID on a matrix board if you're running Linux or BSD (since neither kernel natively supports RAID for boot drives) but on Windows it's pure stupidity.

Back to the point: if RAID is an advertised feature, and consumer hardware doesn't support hotswap or makes it very difficult, parent's point is totally valid.

So what will the Home Server product be? Not having seen it (my MSDN subscriptions ran out LONG ago) all I can guess is that it will push advertising into the grey areas of legality just like the Vista sticker did: sure, it'll support hot swap RAID*

*But only if you have a hot swap chipset (figure $150 min for a quality board with Matrix) and hot swap chassis

In any case, this has been deliverable on Windows XP (a home OS) for years now, since most workstation boards supporting Hot Swap have supported Windows XP from the beginning.

If you are concerned about drive heat, which another poster was, the eRaid has a good cooling system, and the drives feel pretty cool when you pull them out. That said the thing is loud, so you would want to stuff it in a closet.

and how portable does it have to be?

There are a bazillion enclosures out there, I'm sure you've found. I picked up an "old" (but brand new) FW400 tower on ebay for $300. It holds 8 drives on 4 bridges which you can daisy chain. Came with a fan or two, and 6 drives totalling about 1TB have been cranking away for a year and a half now with no failures. It's the size and shape of a tower PC. Not really a cute companion for your mini.

Alternately, I've got a pair of Sabrent enclosures which I use for backup of my laptop and mp3s. I can take them on the road with me. They run off of USB power (USB2 transfer), and are only slightly bigger than the notebook drives they enclose. I won't say that they're fool proof, as I had to send one back almost immediatly after recieving it because it had a bad contriller board. However, they're supersmall and I haven't noticed heat issues, though they're not used in a hot environment. Down side is that they require 2.5" (notebook) drives, which will run you a bit more than a 3.5" on a per-gig basis, and you can't get a really big one (120GB max on the market right now, iirc).

Of course, you could also look at one of these which is a 2 bay, optional HW RAID 0, FW800 PATA (the old IDE/ATA spec) enclosure for $130. It's got fans and at least a bit of style, and with two 500GB drives would certainly give you room to spare.

FireWire Depot does have the enclosures available and they normally ship within 24-48 hours of the order being placed:

http://fwdepot.com/thestore/product_info.php/produ cts_id/657

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?)

• Directron huge selection and prices aren't too bad. Does double boxing for a small fee. Has nasty habit of putting fragile sticker on shipping carton which means "kick me" to UPS and Fedex.
  
• Provantagedecent selection and low prices on some stuff. Cable prices are cheap but they make up for it in shipping fees big time. Packing is a little uneven. You want a disk drive real bad if you order from them. I don't check their site unless it's something I know they have at a good price before hand.
  
• Performance PCsPC modding stuff.
  
• FrozenCPUanother modding place.
  

You have to check around. Not any one place has the best prices on everything or the best selection. For a particular part, there may be only one vendor carrying it.

Anyhow, the point is hardware RAID *costs* but in many ways there is no substitute.

Yes, FW Depot's eRAID System looks very interesting.

Wouldn't FireWire be better, considering FireWire-IDE bridge enclosures are readily available and actual throughput is much faster usig the Oxford 911/922 chipsets?

http://fwdepot.com/thestore/product_info.php/produ cts_id/141

I should have mentioned on my other post that, AFAIK, all "non PATA" CD/DVD drives use bridge chips/boards for USB2, Firewire, and SCSI. So, again, you can get your own bridge board and provide your own solution. You can try here for a selection that might suit your needs. They even have USB/Firewire combo and Firewire2 (1394b) bridgeboards. I got my Oxford 911 chip based firewire bride for an external case w/ mobile rack for hot pluggable hard drives. SATA is supposed to be hot pluggable but I have concerns about the SATA connector duty cycle rating. It seems to be a little low to be using it for removable drives.

Not only is FireWire 400 faster than USB 2, but FireWire 800 (IEEE1394b) is even faster than that. Built into new PowerMacs and PowerBooks (except the 12"PB), and available here here here and here (quick Google results).

why would you use usb2 instead of firewire?

you can get bridgeboards at bridgeboards and they even offer some usb2 bridgeboards for those of you that want to go that route

for a great selection of 1394a, 1394b and firewire/usb2 combo boards check out firewire bridgeboards

doing it is fairly simple:

1) find someplace to purchase an old scsi multibay box
2) remove the centronics ports and remove them
3) install firewire bridgeboards in their place
4) connect and install the drives
5) connect the power supply to everything

check the selection bridgeboards available at firewire bridgeboards

you don't need to buy a full box - you can buy a cheap old scsi box, remove the centronics ports from the back and replace them with firewire boards to connect drives to - check out the boards at firewire bridgeboards

you can get an old scsi type multi bay enclosure at most any computer store - what firewire depot offers is a wide selection of bridgeboards to use and thats cool - 1394a, 1394b and combo firewire/usb2 - check it out at bridgeboards

FireWireDepot has a few of them.

FireWireDepot has a few of them.

FireWireDepot has a few of them.

Interesting Thought.

1. Rendevous probably wouldn't come into play - it's really system-to-system.

2. The device to device communication could be especially useful when recovering a failed disk - no overhead on the controller. This, though, would require the devices themselves be better than mere drives, driving the cost up.

3. Unfortunately - without drives with actual FireWire interfaces (all externals use FW-IDE bridges, the Oxford 911 being the fastest at 50MB/s, 35MB/s sustained) the true potential of FireWire will remain untapped. Perhaps as we move to Serial-ATA and away from the standard parallel IDE, manufacturers will be prompted to offer FireWire drives as well.

Additional possibilities:
Think of a trimmed-down Xserve RAID with FireWire instead of Fibre Channel - it would be able to take advantage of the bandwidth of FireWire and still maintain (?) affordability for low-to-mid range businesses looking for large high-speed external storage.

All sorts of possibilities.

If you look at the actual specs, and the fact that the enclosure provides "Real-time... Encryption/ Decryption" all this enclosure does is to encrypt the data going out, and decrypt traffic coming in. The data on the actual hard drive does not seem to be encrypted. This enclosure is not going to stop anyone who bothers to actually open the case, remove the hard drive and put in their own enclosure/install it in their own computers. Nobody in their right mind should use this case, unless potential data thieves are going to nicely agree to keep the hard drive in its pretty enclosure, or the manufacturer adds a lock to the case.

see FWDepot ok, so the above is too pricey, but it does prove that 2 drives are fine on one board.
Another vendor of bridgeboards shows a 2 drive board. The suggestion to use a computer case is a good one, or any scsi case can be used..... or Legos.

I'm wondering, just how much time did you spend with google before you asked /. ?

I got my FW to IDE bridgeboard here. Not exactly the $35/board you're looking for, but it does indeed do master/slave so you'd only need two. It works great under Linux (RH8.0) and is fine under XP. The only problem that I have is that with XP, I can't unmount the devices so there is no way for me to do a hot-unplug of the device. Not a huge issue, but it's kind of annoying.

You can get fire wire controllers for PCs... I think it's beginning to crop up on mother boards as well. These Guys have fire wire goodies and they're just in the first 10 sites you get when you Google for "FireWire".

:q!