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HDD Tower DIY Drive conection?

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by dondefy

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Hello Ladies and Gentleman!

I have the following tower:

http://usb.brando.com/prod_detail.php?prod_id=00529

The above is just a bare bone skeleton.

SO my question is: How do i multiplex five hdds into one?

I was thinking of this:

http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad4sr5hpmus.asp

But that's very pricey!

So i know i need a power supply. I would like to run all of the HDDs of one power supply. A bit of soldering should sort that out :)

However i am very confused about the multiplexing part. Basically all i want is for my computer to recognize say five 1tbs as one 5tb.

Any ideas?

Regards,
Defy

5 replies

by dondefy

Well the whole idea was to have one massive portable hard drive i.e. i have about 10 external hard drives lying around the place so i though sticking them into a tower will save me some space.

You see i want one connection to be coming out of the hdds. At the moment i have multiplexed in a 10 port USB hub. so i have one connection going to a usb 2.0 and i can see all 10 of them.

The problem i have the read right rates of a single 2.0 usb is to slow.

This project should also improve the read/write speed to the hdds.

I have usb 3.0 dongle for my pci slot but there are no converters for sata or IDE to USB 3.0 and there are nu USB 3.0 hubs :(

So the question now is what should i do?

How can i make this tower work?

Thnx for the reply :)

by bitdoctor

As the other person pointed out, you would set it up as Spanned "Dynamic" disk, then add all the other 4 x 1TB drives to the dynamic disk, making it one logical drive "spanned" across 5 physical drives; i.e., one BIG "C:" drive.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308424

An alternative is to get a hard drive controller that supports your number of drives and has RAID 0 - striping of your data across all 5 drives, but no fault tolerance and no redundancy.

Note that XP Professional's built in ability to create and use Dynamic Disks in a spanned set/volume is basically the same as a "Software RAID 0 configuration."

As for ONE power supply powering all drives - hmm - that should be possible - a lot of higher-end power supplies have 4 connectors, and you could do an adapter to convert one of the other connectors I suppose.

But I also want to ask why you would do this? It's just as easy to have 5 logical drives, C through G, for example. With a 'spanned' setup, if one drive goes flaky, you basically just lost ALL your data, because the O/S treats it as one big Master File Table; one big logical drive.

At least with 5 separate drives, you would not lose your everything if one drive went bad.

But best would be RAID-5 - get a RAID controller and use it. That will use one of the 5 drives as a 'hot-spare' automatically, in case one of the other drives fails. So, your space gets reduced by 1TB (for that hot spare), but if a drive fails, it automatically used that extra 'hot spare' and fails over, without loss of data, so you can keep running, while you go and order a replacement drive. When replacement drive arrives, put it in place of the bad one, and you are done - the RAID array basically rebuilds itself, and keeps a 'hot spare' when you set it up as RAID 5. This is most often what we do in large corporations. NOTE: This is NOT a substitute for backing up your data! Nor is RAID 0, but RAID 1 comes close, since it mirrors all data on one drive to the other drive.

IBM has a good primer on RAID:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/eserver/v1r2/index.jsp?topic=/diricinfo/fqy0_craidvol.html

by dondefy

You see when you mention RAID controller straight away for me it means using a mother board.

Whats i wanted to to do was to keep it as basic as possible down to 4 components(HDDs, Power suply, Tower, Sata hub). So not use a mother board.

From what your saying i will have to use one?

Apparently this one has an integrated raid controller:

http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad4sr5hpmus.asp

Would i be able to use it without the mother board? (i.e. power it up hook up my hard drives to it)

All i am trying to implement a an HDD tower like thee ones they have online for 300-500 euro. But keeping the budget under 150 euro.

"It's just as easy to have 5 logical drives, C through G, for example. "

5 logical drives is fine i was just concerned about the transfer rate if i am accessing all of them at the same time via on cable, but i did some research and it shouldn't be an issue any more.

http://www.serialata.org/technology/port_multipliers.asp

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