I run a tech-writing business from my home and I have a collection of drives from retired workstation. Most are 200-400 GB sized. I want to create a repository and backup farm. Can someone recommend an enclosure so that I might:

** put several drives into one box to avoid (a)separate power
adapeters, and (b)need for separate desk or shelf space
** connect "the box" as an external drive stack
** disk space available to Linux (NFS or other linux native)
** disk space available to various win-dose (SAMBA or similar)
[note -- NFS okay too if there is an FOSS edition of NFS)
** prefer ethernet attached
** prefer browser-based administration
** My preferred linux is Ubuntu family (Debian kin-folk).

I don't mind a roll-your-own project, but I need something that is very complete parts list -- this box, these cards, those applications and utilities, an so on. Most of the small system-box enclosures don't offer much room for drives. Most of the small system-boards don't offer larger numbers of drive controllers or controller slots.

Thanks in advance,
~~~ 0;-Dan

... this is not going to happen. Whatever you do it will take up space someplace and will need power. Since you specify "external" these will have to be seperate. (IIRC: usb does not provide enough power for regular HDDs but I could be out of date for this.)

OR I have misunderstood and you just mean you don't want to have a seperate PSU for each drive in the enclosure? (As an advantage over using multiple single or double drive enclosures.)

Most products will give you the rest.

You remove the front of a small system box if you want to build your own RAID box. Still, you may not have a generic box so you'd have to buy HDD frames. Note - there exist small boxen explicitly for this purpose. If you have an old computer lying around then creating your own server may be the best-practise solution for you.

I don't want a desk or shelf filled with one-drive boxes connected to a strip filled with power warts.

I thought of this, but then every "small box" has a limited number of drive slots.

I have ancient tower cases but they are way larger than what I want to deploy. I'm remembering my Sun(tm) days when there was a "cube" with four or six or eight drives, a power cord and a data cable (albeit SCSI). I'd like a similar cube that offers similar drive mount capacity and either NAS/SAN or USB or FireWire conx to my local hosts.

~~~ Dan 0;-D

You could get the following.

AeroCool S9 Pro
three ICY DOCK Multi-bay backpane SATA hard drive
three Addonics 4X1 Hardware Port Multiplier (AD4SR5HPMUS)
AMD Sempron
Any AMD motherboard like a 780G
SeaSonic SS-550HT 80plus (550 watts)

The ICY DOCK should fill up all nine 5.25 inch drive bays of the AeroCool S9 Pro. The AeroCool S9 Pro comes with an over size fan for sufficient air cooling and while being low noise, so rear fan is not needed. The Addonics provides a cheap way for hardware RAID with out depending on software.