PATA NAS or plain enclosures to keep my quiet up

[G_K]

Hi folks,

I find that I still have a fair supply of PATA drives that have plenty of life left so I am using them as archive storage for certain backed up data on my network (Photostock, templates etc). It's not something I am going to need accessing every day but often enough that I am going to dedicate some hardware at it. Right now it looks like I pick and grab 4 external drive enclosures or if I can find one a NAS that supports PATA drives.

One of my concerns for this is noise generated by the device. Right now I have an Airlink 101 5.25 external USB Enclosure and it's quite loud with the mini fan they choose for the unit. I do like a device with good airflow and cooling but having to live with a dull roar in my home office isn't something I want to do when I am searching my photostocks and such.

Any hardware recommendations would be welcome. Keep in mind there is a budget of $300-400 for this, more than that and I might consider just doing a server build and I really don't want to bother with the wattage draw of that just now.

Thanks

[sabregen]

Pick up a few old SnapServers on eBay, they can handle up to 750GB's with the firmware update. Two drives per enclosure.

[Danny Bui]

Another option would be this $200 Addonics NAS NASMT4IUB Mini Storage Tower which can fit 4 IDE hard drives:
http://addonics.com/products/nas/nasu2_mstex_ideu2.asp

[InvisiBill]

This is sort of going the server route, but not quite... I turned an old Dell office PC into a FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org/). It's not an electricity-sucking PowerVault (http://www.dell.com/powervault) (it literally doubled our power bill for the month we had that thing running), and you're limited only by the PC's hardware.

[G_K]

In some ways I may just grab a cheap little C7 board and try and do it as low wattage as possible. I am still shopping around to see what I can find I like but I am not rushing in just yet.

When Linksys had the NSLU2 devices those were fantastic and I suppose probably still around even if they are discontinued. It might be nice going that route and use some external enclosures. I will have to think about that some.

Thanks for the suggestions