metspitzer said:
I have a friend that uses WinMx for P2P. I use it too but I am not as
big a "collector" as he is.
I think he has 5 drives in one machine.
What is the best way to add say 5 TB to a machine?
http://www.mxpie.com/downloads.html
BTW get the 3.54 version
The only warning I'd have, is that there is a 2.2TB limit to
volumes in some OSes. So if you were using multiple disks
in some kind of RAID configuration (like RAID5), there is
a hack necessary to handle more than 2.2TB. The controller
would have to support changing the sector size. (At least
one Areca controller, supports an option to fool the OS about
the sector size.) There are probably ways to fix it at the
OS level as well, so more research might be required.
With SATA, it is possible to multiplex disks onto a
SATA cable. There are adapters, that allow five disks
to share a single cable.
http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sata_port_multipliers/3726PM.asp
Silicon Image makes chips to do that. The SIL3726 was
probably the first to support this. There are now additional
models.
http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=26
http://www.siliconimage.com/docs/SiI-DS-0121-C1.pdf
"Full support for FIS-based switching and command-based
switching SATA host controllers"
So you could fill your computer with SATA controller cards
of one sort or another, use a $1000 Areca with a ton of
SATA ports on it, or use Port Multiplier boxes and your
existing SATA connectors on the motherboard. Even using
NAS boxes is a possibility, but not a cheap one.
The cheapest way, would be a SIL3114 based PCI card, with
total of four ports. That is the cheapest expansion
mechanism I know of. I can see a couple reports here, of
using more than one card, and the card is $25. But when
you read the reports, you'll see not everyone is happy
with their purchase. Part of the fun, is flashing the
onboard BIOS (the SiliconImage site has various on-card
BIOS versions).
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=15-124-020
Don't forget to include a backup strategy in your
budgeting. There should be a second copy of your
data stored somewhere, even if you have to plug in
a 1TB drive one at a time, and copy stuff over. Running
RAID5 is not a replacement for doing backups. If the
power supply goes crazy on your computer, it could burn
all the hard drives in the computer at the same time.
(It does happen - someone confirmed such a problem
once, when I mentioned the hypothetical possibility of
it happening.)
HTH,
Paul
