Slashdot Mirror
Turning a PC into a Firewire-Based SAN?
Rachovenov asks: "So I've finally plunked down the money for one of those new, shiny Powerbooks, but they don't have much storage. My old PC is just sitting here with 2 identical 250 gig disks spinning away and an empty firewire port. There's even a hardware RAID controller in there somewhere. So why not use it as a low cost RAID 1 array for the Powerbook when I'm at home? Has anyone done this? How could I make it so that Mac OS X just sees it as a couple of Firewire drives?"
You wanted the PC itself to be act as a firewire drive?
Good luck. Macs have this built into the firmware, not PCs. I don't think it's even on anyone's radar. But I don't imagine it's too difficult to write something that could do the job using libraw1394 and the SBP2 documentation.
Good luck!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Pop a gigabit ethernet card in your big machine and use a regular network connection. No need to get complicated with Firewire networking or whatever.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
I hate to point it out, but that is not the solution you are looking for (waves hand).
You already have a PC, and the two disks built inside. Mirror or stripe the drives in the system (your choice, I'd got for a mirror) and then install Linux or BSD or whatever server-ish operating system you want on the box with the right services (Samba, NFS, whatever). Connect to it with IP over firewire, Ethernet, or gigabit ethernet if the old system supports it (the laptop does).
This will allow the system to keep running when you are not around, will allow you to use the disk over that fancy wireless connection on your new Po-po-po-powerbook!. If you put SSH on the box I'm sure you'll figure out how to access your home disk from the road (for bonus points roll your own remote file access solution based on some creative web based interface running on port 443 that no one will ever block).
Last but not least, you'll be able to access the disk from the PowerMac system you'll eventually buy when you realize that the Powerbook is just a touch slow, the keyboard is not so comfortable, and the trackpad is complete crap (mind you, I have a 17" PB myself and love it to death, but all of the above are true and that's the reason I use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse with it when it's "docked" at home).
-Jack Ash
As people have more and more old machines lying around, having a live CD with a single purpose operating system. I think there are already distributions that transform a PC into a router, but changing an old PC into a firewire hard drive enclosure looks like an interesting idea.
One advantage of this approach over installing a file-server is that the hard drives are seen directly by the OS, this means you can boot of them, do low level manipulations (like formatting them), directly from the client machine.
One such distribution I would like to see (one can dream), is that changes an old PC into a advanced dock for a laptop. Typically, a thing I can connect my laptop to, and I get to use the peripherals of the PC: hard-drives, CD-drive, keyboard, mouse, heck even the floppy drive.
The goal would be to have all those devices recognised as being devices attached to the laptop, i.e no client server protocol to share them - basically the PC would pretend to be a firewire or USB hub with a lot of devices attached.
Maybe I would even make sense to use the sound-card of the PC. Not so long ago I would have suggested also to access the display of the PC and use its CPU as a powerful GPU, but given the graphical cards one can now find in laptops, this makes no sense.