There are a few possible changes coming down the pipe. I want to move my data storage from my IBM server to my Dell server. The problem that I come up with is trying to store the SATA drives in the case of the Dell. On my IBM I have three 5.25″ drive bays and so I put one of those internal SATA drive bay enclosures that hold 4 drives in the space of three CD Drives. Well, it has been working fine but when I got the Dell I noticed I only have two 5.25″ bays to work with and so I was thinking that I could either find another enclosure that fits in the two bays and holds 3 drives or have the SATA drives in an external case of some sort. Well, The fastest way I was thinking was purchasing a case that would hold the drives and provide 4 or so esata ports on the back and I could get things working proper. The issue I have with it is that it costs some good money to get a case like that and that is money I do not have. Another way was to get an old case, rig the power supply to always come on when power is provided, and then just house the drives in there and still do the eSATA method. The third was to throw iSCSI at it. I have played with it once before and while it worked I was not terribly impressed with it. The reason was that there are more points of failure that I do not have money to fix. Instead of just the links between the units as with eSATA I have another OS(iSCSI host) to take care of which is something I don’t want. Along with that is a even more hardware that puts out a lot of heat. Anyway, I am still thinking hard about this fun stuff.
Sep 05