4 250GB drives in a small, hot box.


Interesting observation, but this gadget is way over my budget anyway. It
does raise the interesting possibility of a USB/Firewire 'standalone' mass
storage bank. (Which, in turn, raises the spectre of a gadget failing with
a
TB's worth of blood, sweat and toil going doon the toobs.......)

Thanks to all who responded here - the links and suggestions are most
helpful. Apparently I've got to check that the motherboards on both/either
of my machines (both running XP) will actually 'see' 200-250 Gig disks and
not report them as having smaller capacities.....??

Over recent years my HD capacity has increased to a couple TB, buying
another disc every couple of months.

I've found cheap prices at Micro Direct (www.microdirect.co.uk) - a little
over 50p/GB for Maxtor 7200rpm with 8GB cache at 160GB/disc, and they're
local to me which is handy. I know it's easier to use larger discs, but if
you can keep the drives smaller and well organised, if you experience a
failure, you will find less material is lost and you know roughly what you
have to reaquire.

I haven't bothered with a custom box for it all (although I am thinking
about it) as I've found networked PCs quite easy to arrange and browse. A
Lian-Li P60 case, for instance, will hold up to 12 hard discs with ease and
yet is a normal-sized PC case. It looks good, has effecient and quiet
cooling and easier than many standard PC cases when adding/removing drives.
It's easy to add additional IDE channels with £20 PCI cards.

As for large disc support, go to www.maxtor.com and look for the "Enable
Large Disc Support Utility" (of something like that). It's a simple
executable which updates the Windows registry to recognise drives over
127GB - most of the solutions I found on Google when I first had this
problem were long and unneccessary - this is simple and works.

Then set up an FTP server and give me access!

Piece of pie!

(Me like pie).