[mythtv-users] OT: 160GB Western Digital, $30 after rebates

[Paul Leppert]

On 6/3/05, Brad Templeton <brad+myth at templetons.com> wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> I've thus come to the conclusion that I can't afford a drive as small as
> 160gb, even if it's effectively free like this one! That's a 21st
> century moment.


I've had the same thought. I have three drives now (original 80Gb and two 
250's with a DVD for the fourth drive). I am considering replacing the 80 
with a larger drive (I'm putting all my DVD's into mythtv).

Perhaps somebody should make a low priced external USB case that holds
> 4 EIDE drives on usb-2, just for video arrays. With video arrays you
> really don't care a lot about the bandwidth limitations that would
> give you, a video stream only needs about 20 megabits for ordinary play
> and record, though more for commercial scan/transcode of course. Right
> now such cases would cost a fair bit more than this drive.


I'd be very interested if anyone knows of something like this that would be 
fairly cheap. Everything I've seen is either 1 drive or is very expensive 
(NAS devices with hot swapping and such). Hubbing a bunch of USB drives 
together is certainly a possibility, and building a scaled down PC for 
network attached storage is another, but I'd really like a less expensive, 
more elegant solution (especially when I can get a USB external enclosure 
(single drive) for less than $40.

I'm assuming that a USB drive would look like any other USB device within 
Linux and that I couldn't do something like create an LVM volume with XFS 
like I do with my internal drives?

By the way, I previously did a quick thumbnail for a scaled down hard drive 
storage (a cheap PC) and ended up with the following:

$46 Antec mini tower case with 300 Watt P/S
$40 AMD Mobo with USB 2.0, Video, Audio, LAN (100Mb)
$52 AMD Athlon XP 1800+
$44 512Mb PC2700 memory
===
$182 plus tax, shipping, etc. (just need to add the drives)

I didn't include a floppy, DVD, keyboard, monitor, or mouse, since once it's 
set up, I shouldn't need them and I can "borrow" any component I need for 
setup from one of my other machines.

My thought would be that a multi-drive cabinet would need to come in about 
the same or cheaper (anyone know if I'm missing anything blatant?). Of 
course, this still only gets me four drives unless I put in an additional 
EIDE controller or get into the SCSI world (which would increase the drive 
prices).

I figured I'd just wait until the holidays and pick up one of those 
post-Thanksgiving specials at BestBuy or CircuitCity and get roughly the 
same thing plus the DVD and a single HD for about the same price.

Comments?

Thanks,
phlepper
-- 
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -- 
Confucius
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