Best way to utilize 8 to 10 IDE PATA drives ranging from 80gb - 200gb in 4-5 old PCs?

[RavinDJ]

So I have about 8 to 10 drives are not being used and just sitting on my desk collecting dust. I would want to put them and spread them out over 4 or 5 old PC's, but what's the best way to do it? I'd like to have the same data on a few of them (to imitate a RAID solution) so as to prevent data loss. The chances of 2 or 3 drives going down at the same time in separate machines are slim to none, I think.

So, what should I do? Any ideas? Plus, some of these machines are P3's running at 400Mhz and up. So, will they even handle a 200 gig'er?

Thanks!

[blendingnoise]

couldn't you build a nas or 2 using those computers or do you want suggestions on how to use them in systems separately?

[gigabyte1024]

I'm not really sure of your question, how do you spread out some hard drives in older machines? Slap'em in thar and flip'em on!

As for 400MHz and 200GB, that doesn't matter.
Some older motherboards may not recognize the whole drive, but it doesn't sound like you're too concerned about that.

[drizzt81]

set up a Linux software RAID based file server.

[eth00]

If you use linux you could use rsync to sync the data between servers. Rsync is a file level program that will take the directory and will copy over only the new files. One nice thing is by default rsync will NOT delete files you have deleted on the primary filesystem - meaning if you accidentally delete a file its still on your backup server. If you run out of space simply run it with the --delete from time to time to clear up the backup box.

If you run windows you can run cygwin on both and still use rsync. There may be some native windows solutions but I am a *nix guy.

[drizzt81]

There may be some native windows solutions but I am a *nix guy.
I have not found one, but there's a one-click install called cwRsync (http://itefix.no/cwrsync/). (note: website was down when i tried)