Homebuilt/Bought NAS box

[Mr Wonka]

I am looking to Build/Buy a NAS box. Unfortunately the specifications I have set seem to place me in the professional market and so the prices are quite ridiculous. Firstly the specs:

1) Capability for 5+ drives (IDE or SCSI, preferably IDE)
2) Gigabit Lan
2) Small
3) Storage Size is not an issue. As I will be upgrading to larger drives as and when funds permit.

A product that comes very close: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...=14&subcat=707

I've yet to find a decent small case thats capable of holding 5+ hard drives. Occasionally Intel drive cages that take 3 5 1/4 bays and hold 5 drives come up on ebay but they need SCSI drives. SCSI drives seem more expensive for equivalent sizes so I'd like to avoid them.

Occasionally 12 bay 5U SCSI units also come up on ebay but I can't justify the size.

One query I have is about hotswapping. I know that only SCSI can support this (dependent on Controller) but would I be able to use USB2 external drives? These qualify as hotswapable surely? What are the speed implications. A quick google hunt doesn't show anything conclusive.

For instance. Could I build a mini-itx system and attach 5 USB2 external drives? If all the cases match I imagine it would be quite an attractive small & modular unit.

Just after some advice.

Thanks
Mr Wonka

[jethro10]

USB drives would be so slow comared to SATA or IDE for instance.

I assume your spec of Gigabit network means you want speed.

I dont think these two points are compatable.

J

[hartz]

SATA drives do support hot-plugging, but hot-plugging is only important if you cannot afford 20 minutes downtime during which you can swop-out a drive. The cost of a hot-pluggable setup is often prohibitive... Are you sure you cannot shut-down, change the failed drive, and boot back up again?

A PC with drives shared across the network is much more versatile and much less expensive. The main article on my blog is about a home-based file server. I'll post part 3 of the series soon.