Suggestions Please

[blafarm]

Ok, after several weeks of researching NAS storage solutions I have concluded that it just might be cheaper and simpler if I just....

Bought an Xp rack mount computer that has lots of drive bays and dual power supplies
Load it with a top of the line IDE raid controller and 4 to 8 250Gig IDE drives
And simply share and map the volume

I'd really appreciate any suggestions that anyone has on vendors of turn-key Xp boxes with lots of drive bays and what your favorite raid controller is that can support up to 8 large IDE devices.

And if you want to tell me this is a foolish idea, I'd welcome your reasoning on that as well!

Thanks in advance for your input.

[UGAthecat]

If your only going to use this system for network storage, you don't even need raid IDE controllers, as win 2000/xp will do raid for you. This does come at a hit to cpu usage (IIRC: increases cpu usage while accessing drive by up to 20%, normally less than 10% though), BUT, since your just using the system as shared storage for your LAN, who cares about the cpu performance. If part of your cost savings vs NAS was due to being able to serve other things from the PC, then you may still want to go with true HW RAID so you don't have to worry about the CPU hit, but thats kinda depends on what services you run.

If your going for dirt cheap, you could even get a motherboard that has a standard IDE controller and a RAID controller both built in, giving you 4 IDE connections for up to 8 drives, and making the overall price cheaper by not having to get separate IDE RAID controller.

As to rack mount vs stand alone pc, a friend of mine says as long as you already have the rack to mount it in, the rack mount solution can be much cheaper, and potentially more reliable just due to being able to have as much airflow as you want to give to each component (IE: space out the drives from eachother).

[blafarm]

Thanks for the advice. After much reseach I seem to be falling in this direction, with Xp Pro as the OS:

http://www.aberdeeninc.com/abcatg/Stirling-S38i.htm