Need more storage for my PC - Drive Array?

[Sherry33]

Well, it's that time for me again. I have money, and I need to spend it on computer hardware because... well, I just do.

Anyway, my problem at the moment is that I'm running out of drive space, and I can't bring myself to delete stuff. I also hate optical media - I mainly use it for backups, as I really prefer having all my "stuff" at my fingertips without thumbing through a DVD spindle or two. Besides, I can't RDP into my DVDs anyway.

I already have 4 internal SATA devices - a 72GB, 10K RPM system drive, a 250 GB, a 160 GB and my trusty Plextor DVD burner. And I have a slew of about 8 external drives - they're mainly older IDE drives in USB or firewire exclosures (4 80 giggers, 2 60's, a 40 and a 20, I think). I like the external drives because it's easy to add or remove them or shuffle them between systems, but it's getting to be a bit of a pain to find space for all of them where they'll have good airflow, be out of sunlight and not be prone to be stepped on, bumped into, etc.

My first thought was a RAID card. Buy 4 new "smaller" (~200GB) capacity drives, pop them into a RAID5 set, and boom - another 600 Gigs to burn through. But I don't have room inside my case, and I can't very well start duct taping drives to the side of my case. Well, maybe I could, but I'm not gonna. Any way around this you guys know of?

So then I thought [external] "drive array!" I'm screwing around with that 2 TB SCSI drive array at work, and the unit's like 8 years old by now. Surely there are some sweet, cheap ones out there for PCs... shockingly, no. $3,000+ SATA drive arrays that are clearly aimed at servers, or the cheapass "up to 4 or 5 drive" drive arrays, which seem to be glorified boxes to basically hold multiple external drives - no RAID support, container management, etc. What the ****? I gotta be missing something.

Am I missing something? Does anyone here run a setup with an external drive array unit that doesn't cost a few grand, or act as a box to put drives in? Or have an idea of where I should look for this sort of thing?

This one looks promising, but it needs an $800 adapter card for full utilization, and might not be PC compatible anyway. It's definitely meant as a poor-man's server drive array setup.

Anyway... any one know anything that might help me for less than the cost of a new PC, or where to find help?

[amanda223]

Well then upgrade your p.c put an 2 g b ram and buy core 2 processor of intel , then the speed will surely boost up...