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The stackables do have 3.5" drives, for example, this one.

The current Mini could use a slightly faster connection (gigabit ethernet or Firewire 800) but otherwise, it's pretty good upgrade solution.

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?)

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ministack/
http://www.lacie.com/products/range.htm?id=10033
http://www.adstech.com/products/USBX-888/intro/USB X_888_intro.asp?pid=USBX-888
http://www.micronet.com/General/minimate.asp

One URL:

http://www.micronet.com/General/minimate.asp

Yes, it's true that since the Mac mini uses a 2.5" laptop hard drive by default, which is why the disk performance is relatively poor. This is why you can achieve greater performance with a 3.5" drive coupled with a FireWire enclosure. But many of the FireWire enclosures out there are what I would call, well, damned ugly. And huge. Way more huge than they need to be. And way too ugly and clunky to go with a computer like the Mac mini, unless you bought it completely for price and could care less about appearances.

Enter miniMate: a FireWire 400/USB 2.0 hub with integrated Ultra ATA 3.5" disk bay with up to a 400GB 7200RPM disk, all in an enclosure aesthetically designed exactly like the form factor of the Mac mini (except a bit shorter):

http://www.micronet.com/General/minimate.asp

See here. Why IDE? FW works just fine...

Have you seen this?

1) firewire - no managment, just loose drives attached to single machines. might as well suggest a usb memory stick. firewire drives don't make a san.

I retail this product. It's called the SANcube. A Windows-Compatible variant is also available, but it appears to be a single-user Raid 0 only.

SANcube by MicroNet.

Some time ago, when I saw an ad about the SanCube I thought "That would be nice to have." and then "That should be possible to make!" especially since Firewire supports multiple masters and it's fast enough to make sense for a (albeit cheap) SAN.

Having one SAN storage which can me expanded and then you can assign partitions to a certain host just is much more flexible than anything else a standard computer uses. LVM and netblock devices help though.

Anyway, the point is, while USB has masters and slaves, Firewire does not distinguish between those, so every Firewire card can be host and slave, which makes it much easier from a hardware point of view to do, what the original poster wants to do.

Now the software is a different thing. While USB is cheap and simple (the master controls and polls the slaves, the slaves just respond), Firewire is much more like SCSI: everyone can start to talk suddenly. Since I am not a device driver programmer, this is too much for me. But then, I am not the one who has to program the device drivers...

The machine is a PowerMac G3 with a media 100 P6000 board and DV daughter card plus an HDRfx addon. It seems Media 100 did everything with hardware. Which makes it quite fast.

We have 384M ram (more would be nice) and two Micronet DatadockLVD RAID stacks (36G and 18G).

The only real problem with this machine is the cost. Plan on spending about $30,000US for this setup.

Media 100 does seem to have some stability issues also, but I think they are more from MacOS than Media 100. On the bright side, there Tech support and Service people are wonderful.

I would go this way if you are doing high end stuff, but it is a bit of over kill for home movies BS
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