NASLite Network Attached Storage

OK some of you may have noticed over the last few months ive posted suggesitons and quesitons about building a more scalable NASLite box.

With NASLite V2 and the drop in price of m/b, usb keys etc NASLite is now IMHO the ultimate NAS solution.

However i cant explain how much time i have spent looking for a reasonably priced case/chassis/rackmount that can hold as many disks as possibly in a neat, logical and heat efficient way.

Something occured to me though. My main NASLIte box currently sits on the desk beside me with all the hard drives in CMStacker modules ouside the case.

So why not take this hack and run with it properly.

I could buy a shelf or even bolt the CMStackers together so that the drives are not in the case at all. All of a sudden drives are logically ordered, cool because of fans and free air movement and cheap cause CMStacker and a few bucks per 4 drives.

The limitation obviously is cable length for the data cable and power.

Power is not such a big deal as i could add a 2nd power supply and make it work independently...

but....

how long can a IDE/SATA cable be in the REAL world. 60cm is actually quite a long way if you go striaght out the case.

What you reckon is this a non starter or an intersting idea?

I'd like to take you off topic just a wee bit - primarily because I like to stay within specification rather than pushing things to the limit and possibly jeopardizing the integrity of my data.

If my memory is right, spec allows PATA cables to be 0.5m, SATA cables to be 1.0m and eSATA cables to be 2.0m - BUT - the infiniband multilane cables more commonly associated with SAS can also be used with SATA and allow for cable lengths of upto 8.0 metres.

There are inexpensive SATA controllers with infiniband connectors and you can also purchase SATA to infiniband cable converters and something you might also want to consider are SATA port multipliers which will let you connect five SATA drives to a single SATA port (assuming of course that your SATA controller supports port multipliers - not all of them do) further reducing the number of cables to tangle behind your computers.

One of my perhaps numerous still born ideas was to build 1U disk arrays each holding four SATA drives connected to the main chassis using either infiniband or a port multiplier - I like to think that this one is "on hold" since I have only just filled all the drive slots in the main chassis and will probably come back to it when I need more storage.

fordem as always a superb post thank you. I had never even heard of SATA port multipliers or infiniband multilane cables so i need to do a little googling before i can reply properly to your comments.

I also just notced that there is a a metal fabricators about 1km from my home so i may pop in there and see how flexible they can be.

I have looked through the documentation and cant find it so if someone else has done it.

I was going to purchase
http://www.addonics.com/products/raid_system/mst4.asp

It can hook up via eSata x 4 or a eSATA port multiplier.

Does anyone know of a host controller card that will take the single multilane bridge cable that is compatible with NASLITE?

or a compatible card that has 4 eSATA ports that is compatible?

Thanks