I have 6 blank internal IDE hard drives totaling around 800 GB. Is there a way I can use this as common storage for all the computers on my home wired/wireless network? I'm not really interested in installing them into my desktop computers to share that way. I want them accessible by all computers at all times.
Right now I have a network hard drive with 1 usb hard drive plugged into the back of it. This has given me 240 GB of shared storage for all my computers. I would now like to use my blank internal IDE hard drives to add to this. Any suggestions? I'd like this to be as inexpensive as possible.
I'm also open to other cool suggestions of what I can do with these hard drives.
2007-03-12 07:54:35 · 4 answers · asked by memphis0013 2 in Computers & Internet ➔ Computer Networking
Yes, these drives are not in any computer. They are internal IDE hard drives (each over 100 GB) just sitting around.
2007-03-12 08:03:36 · update #1
If I understand correctly, you have 6 (internal) IDE drives that are NOT inside a computer.
To share these on a network, you either need to put them in a computer setup as a file server (or, at least, has peer-to-peer networking turned on) or put them in a network drive enclosures.
You can buy a network enclosure for $50-$100 per drive.
Or, as you already know, you can put them in USB enclosures and then hook them to the back of your existing network drive.
2007-03-12 07:58:20 · answer #1 · answered by Jay 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
You could look to build a cheap file server system with a RAID controller to hook up your 6 IDE drives. I'm not too familiar with the RAID cards for IDE devices outside of the HighPoint RAID that was built into my motherboard and it only supports 4 IDE disk and 4 other IDE devices, but not through the RAID. I'm not sure that I would go through the effort to build any IDE RAID devices with SATA available.
2007-03-12 15:02:21 · answer #2 · answered by Jim Maryland 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Go for it! Put it on your network, store pictures and video or you could possibly partition it if you're up for that. I'm soooo jealous!
You could also put more than one operating system on it.
Good luck! Let me know what you decide.
2007-03-12 14:58:37 · answer #3 · answered by kluvs2write 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Hi. Does this help? It's from Fred Langa. http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=183702383
2007-03-12 14:58:29 · answer #4 · answered by Cirric 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋