working on a new project. multi harddrive bay possabily 10 ide or ata. i figure usb to ide or ata? using a old psu for power & interfase kits for data. but can you imagine 10 usb ports & 10 adaptors. that wouldn,t work. any ideas
I have 5 hard drives installed in my mediapc with capability of adding a few more. For data IDE drives you can use PCI adapter, those usually have 2 IDE slots for 4x drives. They also have these adapters available for SATA drives. Most motherboards already have at a minimum 4 to 6 sata ports. I've also use the USB adapters hooked to the rear of my computer case, that has worked for me. I run my mediapc with the 5 drives on a 400 watt power supply. All the drives have good airflow over them.
So, you are wanting to connect a bunch of old drives that people have thrown away, and you want them in an external case? You could get 12 USB to ATA adapters, and 3 4-port USB hubs...it would still take 3 USB ports, but it would not be as bad. If they were SATA drives, then you would have a some better options, but ATA was never intended for anything like this.
testing other options right now. the hdds are sata 500gb x2 ide 320gb x1 ide 250gb x2 sata 300gb x1 sata 750gb x1 all in 1 unit if possable. sata 1tb x3 ( for mediaplayer 1 in the unit & 2 in a ex case . space is an issue.