I can't complain. It's currently serving my FLAC, MP3 and DVDs. I over-estimated the amount of space I needed, but that's fine.

Windows is installed on a separate 40GB drive.

Using SATA would have been better for me. Too many flat ribbon cables all over the place. I will probably round my own cables or just buy some pre-rounded ones.

How many drives can you get with SATA? Are there cards for them? My mobo only has two connectors on it, so I can only get two there, right?

Also, don't you dislike Western Digital drives? I thought they were the only ones with SATA drives up to the size you're talking about...

3Ware has SATA Raid cards. I don't know much about using the technology (since I never have), but I do believe that it's one drive only per connector.

The previous poster says he is buying 160GB Maxtor SATA drives. I used 160GB Samsung ATA drives. Maxtor is cool with me.

The SATA Raid card supports 4 devices, 1 per connector. There is no master/slave type stuff with SATA as far as I can see, so two connectors means two drives.

the MB also has a number of SATA connectors on it, but I'll probably get a normal IDE drive just for windows.

Paul.

Rob, did you have any trouble with current draw at startup? What sort of PSU do you have. I'm a bit concerned about powering 5 drives all at once, especially if I keep some of the existing scsi stuff in there.

Cheers,

Pau.

I am using this 420W power supply. I have no current problems that I can see.

I have 5 hard drives, CD-ROM drive, floppy drive, and Duron 1.3GHz CPU and the RAID card.

I hope this is not under WinXP..

If it is, then I wonder what happens when a drive dies and is replaced.. will XP refuse to boot (since it memorizes "legal" configurations and barfs whenever anything changes..).

-ml

It still boots up to 5 times before you must re-activate it. A simple 5 minute phone call does the trick. I've done it a couple times.

Also, you must usually replace more than one piece of hardware for the re-activation to kick in.

Oh, okay, maybe a feature of the PRO version, I suppose.

A friend here has spent the past three weeks trying to recover her files from a corrupted filesystem on WinXP Home. We copied the original drive to an identical unit so as not to let WinXP fsck up the original, and it refused to boot AT ALL on the copy, complaining with various accusations of piracy.

Total lunacy.

-ml

Ah. I've never been able to do that either with home or pro. The funny thing is, it's ridiculously easy to install a pirated version of XP, but when you are trying to make an honest change, it screws you over.

Odd. I moved my hard drive from a Shuttle SS51 XPC into an SB51, and XP didn't complain at all about not being activated. This is with a full retail XP copy. The differences between the systems were the main chipset changing from a SiS based one to an Intel 845. This was with XP Pro Service Pack 1 about 9 or so months ago.

I am using Win2k on the RAID box but I've seen it barf just as much as XP. I don't think it will be a problem though since I am not using the RAID array as the boot device/system drive.

Here's what I'm doing for raid5, 6 160gb drives. 5 of them in the array with a hot spare for protection. I used a sx6000 controller and the IDE hotswap drive bays. This way I know the status of the array at a glance.

Maybe I should take a picture of my server. It won't look as cool though.

Cool server, what do you use it for?

I rip all my dvd's (at least my favorites) and place them on the file server. I then access them via XLobby and TheaterTek . Both the home theater and the TV in the living room have access to the file server through HTPC's.

Here's my server (it's the black one). It's still sitting on my desk since that's the only way to get 1000Mbit to it at the moment. Thankfully it isn't too loud.