Here's a heads up on a storage option that has worked really well for me. I use it for computer backups and now for recording file redundant storage as well.
When I upgraded my two work servers a year and a half ago, I ditched the old HP DAT tape backup and switched to automated backups to hard disks in a small external tower. The storage tower is a little four drive bay
Addonics mini-tower. It's basically just a small case with a fan, power supply and indicator LEDs and can accept various inexpensive interface controller cards. Each day I copy the latest backup over to a pocket sized Mini 500GB USB drive that is convenient to carry off site each night. I also keep a less frequently updated large format external drive at home.
I originally bought it with their 4xIDE>USB interface installed and added two 400GB Seagate HDDs. It connects with a single USB cable to the computer and can be set so that the drives appear as either one big drive, two big drives, or just a bunch of individual drives (JBOD). I kept the backup drives as individual disks.
That configuration has worked well, but I needed more space for our backups and I also wanted safe, redundant storage for my recordings so I could free up all the primary storage on the servers I was using. The original 4 drive interface card is IDE based and the cost of 4 SATA>IDE adapters to accommodate larger capacity SATA drives was about the same cost as a new SATA based interface card(s).
Looking at the Addonics interface card options, I found a new one that offers a USB or eSATA connection to the computer and can configure 4xSATA drives in various RAID configurations. Unfortunately all the disks must belong to the same array and it does not support JBOD. Not what I wanted. Instead I bought two separate
2xSATA drive controller cards that do support JBOD. The mini-tower has two access slots in the rear so I called to confirm that this arrangement would be supported - it is, but required a bit of modification..
Using right angle ended SATA cables, the two cards stacked one above the other and fit (barely), once I notched out the card securing screw holes in the back of the enclosure so the top card could move up slightly. I also had to make a power cable adapter to power the second card since the cards have smaller floppy drive style power connectors and the power supply only provides one.
I replaced the two 400GB Seagates with four 1TB WD Greens. Man, do those things run cool compared to the Seagates. Even though it was a tight fit getting everything in that small enclosure, I routed the cables to the sides for best airflow and the 4 cool WD Green drives run much cooler than the 2 previous Barracudas. I now have two independent storage arrays each with it's own USB (or eSATA) connection configured as follows-
The server backup half is configured as two independent drives and provides two weeks of nightly weekday backup capacity plus historical friday backups going back 3 months. It connects via it's own USB cable to my primary file server with the backup software.
The music backup portion is configured as a single 1TB mirrored array (RAID1) and connects via it's own USB cable to the other server, which is easier for me to access with a USB SDHC card reader or external USB drive when I add files. This is now my primary storage for my recordings. It has allowed me to free up space on the two server's primary RAID arrays by moving everything to the external drive tower, while retaining mirrored protection against a drive failure. I keep two other complete data sets of my recordings at home - one safety on several 3.5" external drives and a primary use set on a 2.5" external USB powered drives that I currently access from my laptop.
Photos-
Topic: Addonics 4 drive mini-storage tower setup w/pics (Read 1432 times)