External IDE hard drive tower?

[www.earthcds.com]

Hello all,
I am out of space and thought it would be nice to add extra hard drives for accessible storage in an external tower (like a scsi, raid, or cdrw tower). Does anyone know of a PCI IDE controller that has external connectors? Or, if there is a way to send the cable (neatly) out the box (an adapter or something).
Also, how can I make a jpg or my video screen (screen shot).
Thanks!!!

[sterno]

It is possible that some company might sell such a thing, but I doubt it. If somebody does it will probably be expensive because of the technical problems involved - IDE was simply not designed for external drives. The maximum cable length is too short, and even having a cable that is the maximum length can hurt performance. Furthermore, each cable can only have two devices. Using external IDE devices in a sensible way would probably require a specialized controller in the external enclosure.

If you want external drives at IDE prices you should probably look in to external Firewire or USB2 enclosures. Virtually all Firewire and USB drives are just IDE drives inside a box with a power supply and a bridge controller. I think I've seen a few enclosures made for two drives, which would help avoid cable clutter.

If you're a do-it-yourself person you can probably throw something together yourself that will get the job done, by using a cheap ATX case and keeping it right next to your PC. If you go that route make sure you get a good power supply, and keep both the PC and the external box plugged in to the same power strip.

[Faustus]

I know for a fact I've seen an external tower that you can load up drives into and its just a firewire connection to the PC... at least I HOPE I didn't halucinate (sp?) it....

[Faustus]

Ok I'm NOT crazy, check here: http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=MAP-302F-01

Of course thats only a 2 bay but it proves they are out there.

[www.earthcds.com]

I was afriad that might be the situation. Here's another option if this gizmo is available:
Using an external enclosure to house the IDE drives. Inside that enclosure (or outside in-line) would be a firewire (or USB2.0) adapter.
You see, I would rather not use single or double firewire enclosures as they limit my expandability (and multiple external enclosures would be expensive and hard to place properly). Therefore, if I use a drive tower (and this interface that I don't know about), then I can add more drives easily as I need them.
BTW, I currenly run my system on 4 SCSI drives in another external enclosure and internally I have 2 IDE drives, a CD burner, a DVD-rom, floppy, removeable drive bay (for backups), and fan controller. This addition would make my system spread out across 3 boxes...

[Faustus]

Just build an extremely cheap PC outta spare parts. Load it up on drives and use it as a file server. Firewire network to it if you need speed.

[sterno]

Using an external enclosure to house the IDE drives. Inside that enclosure (or outside in-line) would be a firewire (or USB2.0) adapter.
You see, I would rather not use single or double firewire enclosures as they limit my expandability (and multiple external enclosures would be expensive and hard to place properly). Therefore, if I use a drive tower (and this interface that I don't know about), then I can add more drives easily as I need them.

The bridge controller used by the external enclosures is usually just a single board with an inch or two of cable, which means it wouldn't take up much space inside a tower. Most of the space used by the 1- and 2-drive enclosures is for the power supply and cooling. If you can find a place that will sell you just those controller boards for Firewire you could daisy-chain them inside a cheap tower case and just have a single line in to the box - all the messy cabling would be inside the case where you could tape it out of the way (people build SCSI enclosures out of PC ATX cases, too). However, I think that the cost of the controller is a large part of the cost of an enclosure, so it still might cost you quite a bit. It's possible that you might find something like this preassembled, but I suspect that most of the people who would want to pay for a drive tower are probably not interested in connecting a bunch of IDE drives via firewire. I think the only high-capacity firewire disk boxes I've seen have been real drive arrays (as in hardware RAID), not just enclosures.

If you want a cheap solution that won't clutter your desk, buy a full-tower or pedestal-style case for your PC so you can cram more drives inside it. Cases with around a dozen drive bays aren't that expensive, though if you want the bigger 15-20 bay cases you'll see a big jump up in price. A good power supply (or two) to handle a large number of drives could easily cost more than the case.

[www.earthcds.com]

Well, a file server...this sounds like a good idea though I have never done this before. The problem is, I don't have the extra parts laying around and I think it would be the noisest solution...another power supply, case fan, cpu fan, etc. I would like a preassembled product if possible or a multichannel (4 or more) firewire to IDE controller. Someone mentioned a bigger case....well, I have a full tower and it is pretty loaded. I suppose I can fit 1 or 2 more in there if I cram them but I hate an overpacked case. This also wouldn't give me the flexability in the future.
Anyhow, I guess I want what I want:
An external tower for IDE drives.
Doesn't anyone else out there need an external storage solution for raw video that doesn't cost as much as single (or double) firewire enclosures that is completely ad-on-able? There must be something out there.
Thanks much for all the replies!

[WeedVender]

Why not try Serial ATA?
its neater than those ribbons, longer, and delivers more data. Ive seen S ATA controllers with 8 available ports for HDD or CDRW. I know Maxtor and WD sell S ATA hardrives.

[www.earthcds.com]

Hey Flaystus, thanks for the tip. I've seen these before but didn't think they made them bigger than 2-bay. So, I surfed a little and came up with these:
http://www.lynxpcwarehouse.com/product/case.html#
http://www.lynxpcwarehouse.com/spec/FW.html
The 4-bay is about $150 and the eight bay is about $300...not too bad. But I wonder how these will affect the system? I guess they would be easy to unplug (probably hotswap too) if there were any problems capturing or whatnot.
WeedVender, I don't know much about serial ATA. I know you need a pci card or MoBo that runs them. Can you use them externally? Are they more expensive? Anyhow, I guess I should do my own research.
The one thing I do know is that IDE drives are the cheapest. I bought a 200gb WD at best buy for $180 after rebates. Anyone else know of any good deals on huge storage for cheap?
Thanks all!

[leebo]

If you're running Win XP you just plug in the firewire cable and XP recognizes it as a removable drive.

I assume it would depend on the circuit board included with the enclosure as to wether XP would be able to format it as a RAID. Does anyone know?

Also, does anyone know of a site that can explain the uses for a file server?

I'm looking to either move my HD filled PC to another room (due to the noise) and keep my monitor, keyboard and mouse where they are (using long cables), OR use a file server in another room and remove most of the drives from my main computer.

[www.earthcds.com]

I'm not interested in RAID for this one. Just a box to add drives to as I need them. I think it would work well.

[Faustus]

It says its the 911 chipset, so it SHOULD work great. Sounds like a winner to me. Just add drives, plug and go.

[www.earthcds.com]

Yea, this sounds like the one. Thanks for the help. Now if I can only find some 200-300 gig drives for about $0.75 a gig......

[dvdnew]

Do you need access to all your drives at the same time?
If not you can go for an external enclosure with a removable bay, so you can buy many bays for around $7 each and put one drive per bay, then if you need drive 1 you put it in, if you want drive 54 then load it. I guess if you have an external firewire enclosure (or double) the drives are all set as master right? so no problem there to change jumpers.

[Mtajr1]

You know I was looking for this a few months back and wasn't able to find anything. Thanks for your help on locating it for me. I have so many HD its insane. In my PC I have 5 total plus one external.

two 160's
two 120's
one 100

and a 80 external

Sick HUH?

[www.earthcds.com]

Heye dvdnew, good idea...but not good enough for me. You see, all my ide channels are taken and I have no more pci slots. So, I came up with an idea:
How about using a mobil rack like you said but have it connected to the firewire port. This would allow hotswapability and free up a ide channel.
Also, you don't need another tower with another power supply (more fans, more noise). And, why keep all the storage drives connected, it will just wear them out faster.
So, I looked into it a bit and I found these IDE to firewire bridge boards. You can connect it to a mobil rack and there you go...a hotswapable mobil rack, running ide drives on a firewire channel. This sounds like a great idea. Check out these links:
http://www.caloptic.com/index.html
http://www.caloptic.com/fwint.html
http://www.caloptic.com/1394bb.html
http://www.caloptic.com/1394hddmr.html
http://www.caloptic.com/1394mr.html
http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg19_firewirebridgeboards.htm
Has anyone tried these before and have any opinions? Does anyone know of a more competitive price? Thanks for all the input!

[DigiToast]

You might want to look into NAS (network attached storage). A NAS is basically a computer server that does nothing but file share. NAS is used widely be companies, institutions, etc. You just keep your NAS on 24/7 and tell windows to mount the drive(s) on the NAS automatically everytime you boot your computer and they'll show up right in "My Computer."

[draganong]

USB2 with external enclosures with Mobile Rack removable drives is what I use. Each one of my computers (desktops or laptops) have USB2 with many devices attached (HDD mobile racked, DRDRW, CDRW. Zip 250). This makes them hot swappable under win2k with NTFS. Very cool to have 100 GB floppies (removable IDE HDDs) and be able to move them around.

Check pricewatch.com, an external USB2 enclosure is under $40. Mobile rack adapters are about $10. The key is to buy a handful, since they do change and become unavailable as companies change their form factor and the whole key is interchangeability.

/Dragan

[draganong]

My PC must have about 15 drives, I believe. Besides 4 IDEs hooked to the built-in IDE controller, there are 3 in a Raid IDE, plus bunch of SCSI3 drives configured as a spanned drive set. Plus the external USB2 devices.

The key is to configure them so that the drive letters are kept to a low number and the disk space is not fragmented in small chunks (therefore volume sets, although risky for data loss).

/Dragan