A storage solution best for me

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Dougjwjr

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 10, 2007
Messages
274
Okay, as I fill up the bays in my computer, I think about this more, and wonder what to do beyond that. I know there are a few solutions available, and I want to know what would probably be best for me.

What I will be using most of the storage for is movies, tv shows, and games. It isnt anything hugely important, but I would like to be able to access any files on an external solution and/or transfer at roughly the same speed.

As it is now I have just under 5tb on 5 drives in my Antec 900 case. Drives are 2x6400AAKS 640gb, 2x1001FALS 1tb, 1x20EARS 2tb. I have room for 1 more drive in my antec 900, which will probably be a second 2tb drive. After that, I am unsure of what my best option would be.

An external enclosure is what comes to mind first, which is probably my cheapest option. Actually, upon consideration, I believe this to be my best solution, unless someone has some better ideas. There are external portable hard drives as well, but I dont know. Thoughts/suggestions?

Thanks,
Doug
 
When faced with roughly the same prediciment a while back I took 1 more thing into consideration & that was power usage.. I assume that your leaving your current rig on 24/7.. Well your sucking up alot of extra juice doing it. Consider making a dedicated rig to do this & shove it in a corner or closet somewhere.. When connected via gigabit you should be able to pull atleast 80-90 MBs transfer as I was using samsung EcoSmart drives. There are a couple good OS's that come to mind for something like this. Being WHS, Amahi & FreeNas.. WHS is the only one that costs money, but its probably the easiest to use. FreeNas is damn small & really easy to do, but not very feature rich. Amahi I have no personal experience with (yet) but appears to be basically the Linux version of WHS since it is made to be a home server & has Drive Pooling with Duplication right from the get go.

Depending on what you have sitting around for old parts you can often do the Server for Next to nothing. Thats what I did to start with & have since replaced everything with low power parts. Dropped my powerbill a solid 30 bucks a month compared to when I left my gaming rig on all the time. And my office isnt so damn hot.
 
I ended up getting a cooler master stacker case for a dozen drives. And then I outgrew that and bought a norco case that has room for 22 hard drives.

I use WHS, have drive protection, system backup and remote access. Works well and it's easy.

Your storage will just keep on growing and you'll need something bigger. You can spend money in the meantime on enclosures but eventually you'll need to get something else. I'd start saving up for that now.
 
You have several options:

a) Buy 5.25" -> 3.5" adapters that let you mount hard drives in the 900's 5.25" bays

b) Buy a bigger (full tower) case that can house more drives.

With options A or B, a SATA controller card may be needed unless you're willing to swap mobos for one with 8-10 SATA ports, but SATA cards aren't very expensive.

c) Buy a NAS (the faster & more reliable ones tend to be expensive)

d) Build a low-power rig as bastage suggested and throw most of your drives in there. That way you can shut down your main gaming PC during the day and save some $$$ in energy costs.

Like Archer75 said, I would avoid purchasing an external enclosure as you're likely to outgrow it. Unless of course you are willing to replace all the drives in your main PC with 2TB models, in which case you'd be set for a while.
 
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