computer as external hard drive

vockleya · 04-16-2011, 12:33 AM

I want to make my own raid array, that is essentially identical to one of those commercially available external raid drives. (http://www.officemax.com/technology/...i_sku=21801775)

The only thing is, I want to do this by using a dedicated computer as the drive, and connecting it to another computer to use as the server. Is there some way to do this. Maybe make a sata port on the raid computer appear lixe a hard drive to the server. Or use a usb 'crossover' cable to connect the 2.

Is this even possible, or should I just use the raid computer as the file server too?

MS3FGX · 04-16-2011, 01:25 AM

It doesn't really make much sense trying to replicate one of these eSATA arrays with a full computer. The whole point is that they are cheaper and more reliable than putting the RAID array on a dedicated machine, so trying to create one from scratch is sort of going backwards.

I would either just get a eSATA array (there are much cheaper ones on the market than that, check out NewEgg), or put the array in the server itself.

jefro · 04-17-2011, 03:37 PM

I'd use freenas or openfiler or openindiana and use iscsi targets.

vockleya · 04-17-2011, 08:07 PM

So I'm assuming that it's pretty much out of the question to connect the 2 computers via eSATA, right?