Daisy-chain USB/FW hard drives

[DVWannaB]

Gang,

Is it possible to connect 2 or more USB and or/FW hard drives in a daisy-chain fashion and then have the computer recognize as one LARGE drive?

I was thinking of recording recording some videos while I am gone for a long time and if possible this would be great to do.

Also, if I did this, when one hard drive was filled, would it automatically start recording to the next hard drive in the daisy-chain? Thanks.

[mats.hogberg]

Disk spanning is hardly possible with ordinary internal drives - takes special OS (Some server soft I presume) and possibly special controllers. Look for "HDD spanning".

/Mats

[CrayonEater]

J-BOD is supported by many controller and motherboard manufacturers. It is spanning - combining multiple physical disks into one logical one as far as the OS is concerned. However, I am not aware of any J-BOD that makes use of external drives, only internal ones.

If you are willing to do a fresh installation on your internal drives, you could install Linux using Logical Volume Manager. I don't know how well external drives would be supported with LVM though.

However, unless you are planning on borrowing those external drives, it may be more economical to just buy a 500 Gb drive or two.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2367991&Sku...C3T-1008%20ISS
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2368647&CatId=0

[redwudz]

Another option for spanning external drives would be to use external SATA drives and a SATA RAID controller. The drives would behave just as if they were in the computer case. They would operate at full SATA speeds. A PCI SATA RAID controller is fairly inexpensive. You can also get SATA external cases with their own power supplies. You can get PCI slot connectors to output the SATA connections or some SATA controller PCI cards have external connectors already. Note that there are two main types of connectors, SATA and SATA-E. SATA-E connectors are more secure than regular SATA internal connectors. SATA cables can be up to 1 meter or about 30 inches long.

SATA external is many times faster than USB or FireWire and no special software or extra drivers should be required to use it.

Here's one site with a few enclosures and other related products: http://www.cwol.com/serial-ata/sata-drive-enclosures.htm There are a lot more similar products out there.

[DVWannaB]

sounds a bit more involved than I have time to wrap my mind around and then executing it.

My PC does have an internal SATA HDD and I believe a place on the motherboard for additional SATA HDDs (I do believe). I also have a SATA 250GB combo USB/FW enclosure and 2-250GB EIDE combo USB/FW enclosures. Was hoping that I could just FW them together and be done with, but may be a bigger task than I was bargaining for

Thanks all for response.

[redwudz]

It's not really hard to do with SATA. Really no different than having internal SATA drives. It just gives you portability and is one option if you have ran out of space for more internal drives. I have several external SATA enclosures and they are hot pluggable and their access and use is transparent to the OS. They are just another drive in My Computer.

If you have unused SATA connections in the computer and no room for drives, you just need the external SATA enclosure and one of these for external SATA connections:


This company has a few of these: http://www.addonics.com/products/other/ You can find other by a Google search for 'PCI slot SATA connectors'.

[DVWannaB]

ALRIGHT!!!!!!!.........that even I could handle. Many thanks.