I have three portable hard drives hooked up to my PC, for a total space amount of 6 TB on my computer, and I have just filled the last of the space up. I have deleted most of what I'm okay not keeping already and I am running out of USB ports. Is there a more efficient way of getting more space than buying more portable hard drives at this point? I don't have much money, so I can't really buy one of those $1,000 cases that house 10+ hard drives that you can run off of one USB port.
yes.. get an old p2 or 3 with 256 ram and build a network file server.. your only limit will be the sixe of drives the bios accepts, though most nfs installations ignore drive bios restrictions.. you will need pci-sata cards but that also takes away the 4 drives limitation..
with the flooding in Thailand, now is a really bad time to buy hard drives. i would wait for the market to stabilize especially if your budget is tight.
beauty of a homebrew file server is the way you can throw old/used/recycled hardware into them.. instead of forking out silly money for new all the time.. my opinion of these these 1TB drives (and sata in general) is they don't last very long.. For servers (commercial/indistrial) I still use 500GB IDE drives wherever possible because experience has shown that they last 5+ years compared to barely 12 months for sata.
just got a replacement 500 gig from novatech it was made in china they put their prices up threefold overnight.back to the question, I agree an old computer as a server is prolly the way to go and raid all the discs together.
