I was wondering if it was possible to wire up a bunch of hard drives to one pc baord, then connect that via, say, a parallel port to act as a single really big hard drive. The basic idea is to turn a PC into some sort of secondary-drive manager for another PC. I've heard of RAID setups, but is there a chip that will let me add all the drives together and make my computer think that it's one drive?
2006-10-17 12:20:37 · 6 answers · asked by sciguy 5 in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Desktops
You've heard of RAID - that's the one you want. I wouldn't think that there is much of a market for what you are talking about - it sounds a bit clunky and unreliable, unless you simply network two or more PCs and only use one of them, and have the other(s) running purely for the storage... seems a bit wasteful when RAID would do the job faster, cheaper, and easier!
Rawlyn.
p.s. illiria - the idea of Y!Answers is that EVERYONE gets to see the answers - requesting personal replies is a selfish way to defeat the object of the exercise. If you want to see an answer, add this question to your watchlist and follow it.
2006-10-17 12:23:52 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
You can only connect 4 drives to a computer using IDE.
The cheepest way to do things is to put an OS on it, connect it to a network and share the drive
For the RAID you'll general be speding a fair bit of $$$. Usualy RAID is connected to the drives using SCSI since they can connect 7 drives at once.
The new MB's with SATA often have RAID built in though there's usualy only 4 ports, though I have seen one out by Dell that has 6 connections.
2006-10-17 12:27:07 · answer #2 · answered by poachedsalmoninawhitewinesauce 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
You could potentially take the old PC you intend to use as a hard drive and run a crossover cable from it to your main machine. And then just enable sharing of the drives.
As far as just setting them up in a strictly hardware fashion without any software installed, I don't think its quite possible, or if it is, its just not worth the time and effort.
2006-10-17 12:28:50 · answer #3 · answered by Ronin 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
no you cant hook up a bunch of hard drives in a old case and then hook them up to a computer, but you can put those hard drives in your computer and use raid to trick the computer into thinking that that bunch of hard drives is one big hard drive. you would need sata or scsi, wick means you would need a relatively new computer. another option is to hook the two separate computers over a network and use it as NAS (networked attached storage) so all the computers in you house can access the same data.
2006-10-17 12:24:58 · answer #4 · answered by Jake 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Yep, it's called a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives or RAID. You can add PCI-RAID cards to the computer which allows you to hook more drives into the RAID.
2006-10-17 14:48:29 · answer #5 · answered by mittalman53 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
My husband would know email him at boobla99@hotmail.com
I am complete computer illiterate.
2006-10-17 12:22:43 · answer #6 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 4⤋