A friend of mine needs to share 10-12 data DVDs over a small network. He asked me to "build" him a tower. Does anyone have any ideas? I know the first thing that people are going to think of is immaging them on a machine already on the network or a nas drive then sharing them as individual drives but he doesn't want to do this. Here are some of the things that have crossed my mind:
1) Full tower, 11 drive bays, a regular machine with O.S., 2-3 additional ide controller cards. Can you have this many ide drives that need irqs? I didn't think so, but maybe someone else has an idea.
2) Full tower, 11 drive bays, a regular machine with O.S., mobo with 8-9 sata ports, additional sata controller card. Can you have this many sata drives?
3) This one might sound silly but, Full tower, 11 drive bays, no mobo, ide to usb cables, usb hub in case, drives connected to 600w power, 1 or maybe 2 usb cables to connect to host computer on network. I know they say you can have up to 127 usb devices connected but how would the performance be? The people on his network (only 3-4) wouldn't be spinning up all 10 at once, maybe 2-3 at a time max. Would all 10 still have to share the bandwidth if they are not accessed at the same time?
Any ideas would be appreciated.
Thanks.
1) Full tower, 11 drive bays, a regular machine with O.S., 2-3 additional ide controller cards. Can you have this many ide drives that need irqs? I didn't think so, but maybe someone else has an idea.
2) Full tower, 11 drive bays, a regular machine with O.S., mobo with 8-9 sata ports, additional sata controller card. Can you have this many sata drives?
3) This one might sound silly but, Full tower, 11 drive bays, no mobo, ide to usb cables, usb hub in case, drives connected to 600w power, 1 or maybe 2 usb cables to connect to host computer on network. I know they say you can have up to 127 usb devices connected but how would the performance be? The people on his network (only 3-4) wouldn't be spinning up all 10 at once, maybe 2-3 at a time max. Would all 10 still have to share the bandwidth if they are not accessed at the same time?
Any ideas would be appreciated.
Thanks.