I was recently given 8 500GB Hitachi 7.2k drives from my awesome uncle. The company he works for got rid of one of their servers and needed the data to be destroyed. He offered to take it off their hands and they allowed him to on the condition that he destroy all the data on the drives. Well he did so he gave me some the drives. He also gave me a Promise FastTrak TX4310 RAID controller along with the drives. I took them home and tested the drives and found that only 6 were working (his company did a horrible job of shipping them to him, he warned me of this ahead of time). It's obviously no big deal since the drives were free.
I'm really not sure what to do with these drives. I don't really want to sell them, and I'm not about to give them away (sorry guys).
I already have 2 1TB Seagate drives in RAID0 on my PC, but I'd like to get some redundancy so I don't risk losing data in case of drive failure. I also don't need 2TB of storage. 1TB is more than enough for me. I would just throw all the drives in my PC, but like I said, I don't need the space all in one PC.
So I guess I should build a NAS. I already have an old Celeron machine laying around but I don't know if that'd be a good candidate. It has two available PCI slots (but I don't think the RAID controller is compatible). I'd also need a Gigabit network card.
I can start from scratch and build an entire machine, but that could get to be pretty pricey. I have some spare parts lying around which include:
AMD Athlon X2 6000+ (3.0Ghz) socket AM2
2x AMD Opteron 254 (single core 2.8Ghz)
10 sticks of DDR 400 CL3 PC3200
So those could help get me started if I decide to go that route.
I could also buy a NAS enclosure thing, but those are pretty expensive too.
I want to move the 1TB drives out of my PC since I don't need the storage and they'd be better fit in a NAS. I could just do a RAID 5 setup in my PC or some other configuration. What combination of arrays (in my PC and a NAS) would be best for me?
Also, what should I do to save as much money as possible to build my own NAS? Should I just buy NAS enclosure?
Thanks
tl;dr: I have 6 drives and I don't need all that storage in one PC. What would be the cheapest NAS solution? I'm not selling or giving away any of the drives so don't ask.
I'd go with building a small cheap system with a Raid5 or something and have the drive shared over the network.
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