XPost: alt.unix.geeks   
   From: lars@beagle-ears.com   
      
   A month ago I decided that I needed to replace the hardware under my   
   Linux Server/Workstation. As I was gaming out the migration, I realized   
   that the hard drives were 10-15 years old, and SMART declared them to   
   be "Pre-Fail - Old Age", so I bought a couple of new 2TB Seagate   
   Barracuda drives to fit in two of the 3 HDD slots in the "new" 5 year   
   old chassis, leaving the last one for future expansion. The system disk   
   is a 500GB SDD drive.   
      
   That leaves me with a handful of 1TB drives from this system and 2   
   Windows boxes that were 10-15 years old and whose CPUs were too   
   old for Windows-11. My thought is that I ought to make a NAS with   
   mirrored drives out of them. Even if they are nearing end-of-life, they   
   should work OK in a RAID-1 confuguration.   
      
   1) Is that a reasonable thought?   
      
   For a stack of 4 drives, I need an enclosure that has 4 (or 5?) bays.   
   L:ooking over the choices on Amazon, it looks like the diskless starter   
   set for that is going to be around $550 - $650.   
      
   2) Is there a cheaper way to do it? Maybe a cabinet without a   
   processor that has an eSATA connector on the outside and just   
   presents itself as the 4 drives, letting the host manage them?   
      
   3) Is it worth it to pay a bit extra to get a box that lets me load   
   my own favorite Linux distro instead of the fixed-function NAS   
   package?   
      
   Between this newsgroup and "the geeky group" I am sure someone has been   
   down this path before and has ideas and experience to share.   
   --   
   Lars Poulsen - an old geek in Santa Barbara, California   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)