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[lpr]

Hello,

I'm starting to look at hot swap drive canisters...  I see my lossless music collection growing and my drive space shrinking!   Right now, I'm running 2 external USB2.0 enclosures with IDE drives and another internal IDE drive in the PC.

What I'm looking for, is a solution where I could keep my existing IDE drives and maybe use FIREWIRE instead of USB2.0. Something affordable, with around 5 slots. This way I could buy trays for future HD additions and library backups.

Is there such a product on the market?

I've seen SATA, RAID, SCSI solutions,  but I would like to keep the cost down and not upgrade my current hardware.

Thanks in advance,
lpr

[KingSparta]

Well I Have 4-each Firewire 300 Gig Maxtor One Touch, I like Them.

They May Have Firewire 800 Drives Out Next\Soon, Maybe I am Guessing But I Would Think The Transfer Will Be Twice As Fast (Using A Firewire 800 Interface Board).

[kaiynne]

I am in the same situation as you.  I am about to build a dedicated raid server though.  There are two main reasons.

1. Redundancy, I just had a drive fail on me and while i had most stuff backed up and all of the physical cd's it was still a huge pain.  I am planning on setting up raid 5 with 4 250GB drives which gives me 750gb of usable space.

2. Downtime, If a drive does fail I will have to simply take out the failed drive and slot in a new one, after an hour or two i will be back up and running.

total cost of my new system.
2 x 250GB = $200
MB + CPU = $79
Raid Card = $140
Ram = $60

The rest i am going to take from current systems. so for less than $500 I will have a redundant server with plenty of room to grow.  which is only a hundred or so more dollars than two external 250gb drives would cost.

[lpr]

I found some cool stuff here:

http://www.cooldrives.com/firen.html

I'll do more shopping around 

Later.

[evanr76]

At the upper end there's something like this bad boy:

http://store.yahoo.com/fire-wire-1394-ilink/mubay85fi800.html

[kaiynne]

Both of those systems look really good, but you have to choose between raid 0 or raid 1.  As far as I can see there is no Raid 5 option yet.  But I could be wrong...
If you are not worried about HD failure or have some other backup scheme they would be a pretty great deal.

[Catul]

Check out the ReadyNAS600 at http://www.infrant.com - it has RAID5 and other neat features, not cheap though.

[NickM]

As this is an OT thread... I use a Snap Server.  I started with a fairly basic model, Snap4500 and upgraded the disks.  RAID5 and 18 months into heavy use one of the discs gave way...  And it kept going, conveniently e-mailing the Service Centre to order a new disk.  Next thing I knew, a support technician called to arrange a time to fix it.  3 Year 24hr extended warranty was an additional $150 - worth it!
nick

[KingSparta]

At the upper end there's something like this bad boy:

http://store.yahoo.com/fire-wire-1394-ilink/mubay85fi800.html

that looks nice and cheep too