I have a home test server set up running Debian with four hard drives LVM'ed up together to make a nice 1 TB. It would seem quite useful if I could take these drives out for practical purposes such as acting like an external drive (I have no other real disk space on anything else and would like to take it to a particular computer convention to download a ridiculous amount of stuff). I was thinking about using a single board computer to link them together because it can run linux, it's small, low watt usage, and flexible. I was wondering if anyone knew of any good manufacturers of SBC's or any other suggestions for a small, compact, and low power consumption way of doing thing? What distro would be recommended that is EXTREMELY lightweight and ready to run on pretty much any architecture? What distro is usually used on small devices? Thanks!

Thinking about this but never seen any small cases that use the sbc boards have more than a couple of drive bays for drives. My only thought is the smallest case one can find with the needed drive bays. Then most common boards will work within that. One possible thought is use of a notebook computer with the drives in an external case and connected to the USB port. Then setup lvm for the drives this way. I have seen hotswap type bays that can be used to remove the drives from that bay holder and placed in the home machine so as not to use USB at home. But the drives must be kept in the correct sequence from machine to machine since LVM is nothing like RAID.

Brian