Building...I dunno... Server?...dunno

Okay, I have a lot of hard drives right now. I have four 500gb hard drives that are external hard drives there I would like to put into some kind of case. I would also like to add on another 1TB at least to this case for future expansion since mine are basically full. So I come to you guys to ask what I could make that could hold so many hard drives. I want to save the money and not get new 1TB hard drives, but I am really tired of these cables all over my room from the externals. Would I need to make some type of a server, and is there a case/mobo that will support 6+ hard drives?

Thanks in advanced.

Your loving mobster,

Vincent Gigante

You can get one of those massive thingies. I forgot what it's called, but they can hold like 4 or more hard drives, and each one is powered and stuff like that, and you just put them in,. Are these external hard drives already put into a case, or are they ones you put in their own case.

Anyways, basically after putting all those hard drives into that big thing, you can plug the big thing into your computer, lol.

[quote4223659900="TFOAF"]You can get one of those massive thingies. I forgot what it's called, but they can hold like 4 or more hard drives, and each one is powered and stuff like that, and you just put them in,. Are these external hard drives already put into a case, or are they ones you put in their own case.

Anyways, basically after putting all those hard drives into that big thing, you can plug the big thing into your computer, lol.[/quote4223659900]

So it would basically be a big external hard drive? These are already in cases, MyBooks. I guess I should have looked to see how easy, if it all possible, they are to remove.

Basically yeah. And if your computer supports eSATA and your hard drives support SATA, they make some eSATA massive external hard drive case things so that they run as fast as it would as an internal hard drive.

You can buy external enclosures that house multiple drives in RAID configurations, but they're pricey (especially for 4 or more drives).

A cheaper and more flexible solution would be to buy a tower case with lots of drive bays, such as the CM Stacker, put in a cheap mobo and CPU plus as many PCIe SATA/RAID cards as you need (if the mobo doesn't have enough ports) and install something like FreeNAS[=http//www.freenas.org]FreeNAS to build a network attached storage array. Then you can expand it with either internal or external HDD's pretty easily and access from anywhere on your network.

Wow, thanks for the CM Stacker recommendation dmorris. That thing is a beauty.