Building a poor man’s Network Attached Storage
1. www.promise.com. You use the Promise Connectstor II box to is a great poor man’s solution. Just $500 and you can put in any pair of IDE drives that you want. YOu can get this from ecost.com right now $526.
2. http://pub90.ezboard.com/fturtlebeachfrm14.showMessage?topicID=12.topic. This board appears to have lots of information on the Promise drive and they rave about it. Check there if you have a problem first and I learned a few things about the thing. For instance, there is a firmware upgrade to get it to support >48 bits addressing, so you can put the 160GB hard drives in.
3. www.storagereview.com. Buy the hard drives recommended. For the absolute biggest in size, the current state of the art is the Maxtor 160’s. The WDC 120s or the IBM 120s are the next choice. Should be about $270 for the 160 and about $200 for the 120s. you can get the 160s at http://www.compuplus.com/insidepage.php3?refer=pricegrabber.com&id=63 and the 120s from http://www.allstarshop.com/shop/product.asp?ad=pg&pid=4344
4. http://support.promise.com/Support/All.asp?product=connectstor2Installation from the manual is pretty straightforward. With the 120’s, you just plug them in. The new IDE cables autodetect everything. With the 160’s, you have to install a small drive, load the firmware and then load a big one. This support.promise.com site btw is quite good.
