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- keep looking for a USB2 external harddrive enclosure possibly with RAID that takes more than 2 drives
I'm unaware if USB RAID drives exist even, and drives connected via USB, even USB2 aren't all to fast either.
- sacrifice a PCI card to add some sort of ATA card, possibly with Ultra-ATA as well as SATA if I can find it
A dual-channel ATA RAID card will take four of your drives. The cheaper ones will do RAID 0, 1 and 10 with identical drives. I have seen cards with dual ATA or dual SATA or one ATA and one SATA, but I am not sure which of the SATA ones were actually hardware RAID cards. There are such things as SATA to ATA adapters, but not ATA to SATA.
- buy a whole new computer to house it all in; can you get motherboards with >2 ATA channels?
That is indeed a viable option, but I have not seen mobos with more than two ATA channels. Two dual-channel RAID cards would seem to be the way to go in this case.
- buy a big new SATA HD (maybe 2 with RAID mirror) with SATA PCI and sell all the other bits to help fund such an expensive
That would cirtainly work. It's up to you. Reducing the number of drives will also reduce noise and your electricity bill.
As for sacrificing a PCI slot could these things go in my router (P120, 32mb RAM, 2 PCI slots; one used for ethernet):
- usb2 card
- SCSI and the 10 drives to go with it (3 using, 7 spare)
Hmm. How about using the spare SCSI drives? Weather the router would take the extra hardware depends on it's configuration. If it's a Linux based job then you can probably find a way of adding the extra cards without too much of a problem.
- What would you do?
Well, personnaly, depending on the specifications, I'd sell the seven ATA drives off, and get me a nice fast ATA or SCSI RAID array. I guess 2x >=80GB + RAID card for an ATA system, or whatever my money can get me in the second-hand SCSI server hardware arena. But then, this is just my two cents worth - the best solution depends on your needs...
Hope this helps!
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