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What To Do With a Hundred Hard Drives?
Makoto916 writes "In five years with my current employer as the IT administrator, I've amassed a sizable cabinet of discarded hard drives; just shy of 100, in fact. All of the drives range in size from 20GB up to 300GB. They've all been stored in anti-stat bags, and spot checks of even the oldest ones show that most of them still work. Individually, they're mostly useless for our line of work, which is digital video production. However, the collective storage potential is quite significant. They are of varying size and speed, but the one commonality is they're all IDE. What is the best way to approach connecting all of these devices and realizing their storage potential? On a budget, of course. Now, I'd never use such an array for critical data storage, but it certainly would be useful as a massive backup array to our existing SAN that does store critical data. I have several spare and functioning PCs, but not nearly enough to utilize their internal IDE controllers; even with multiple add-in controllers, it still wouldn't be enough. Not to mention the nightmare of managing a bunch of independent PCs. I've looked into ATA Over Ethernet and there's a lot of potential there, but current 15 to 20 bay AoE cabinets are expensive, and single device enclosures are so rare that they're also expensive. Are there any hardware hackers out there who have crafted their own home-brew AoE systems? Could they scale to 100 drives? Is there a better way?"
What absurd nonsense -- this is just a bunch of horseshoe magnets laid next to each other. You get both poles, they just happen to point in the same direction.
Let me suggest that you lay off three-syllable words like "monpopole" until you've learned at least to look them up on wikipedia...
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Or you could just do the normal thing and use a swap partition. Are there any actual benefits to using a swap file on a file system instead of an actual swap partition?
I mean, sure, it's incredibly useful in certain circumstances when you CAN'T make a swap partition. My VPS has one big partition, stored on a SAN, and I can't repartition anything. Being able to make a swap file was super handy. But in a real computer, this shouldn't be a concern.