RAID Disk Box… Engaged!

First of all, I have to give kudos to Henry Wong from Arena-MaxTronic, Inc. for putting up with me asking a bunch of really stupid questions and walking me through reconfiguring the MaxTronic Arena RAID box (similar to this one but an older version).

I had been watching this box at work sitting beside the desktop support guys desk for a while, and finally asked about it. Turns out it was a leftover acquisition and they’d never gotten it to work. It’s a 6 disk box filled with 8G drives (oooh… ahhh…). It is external and converts the PATA drives in it into an external SCSI connection that connects up to whatever system you have a SCSI connector in. Pretty cool.

So took it home, and other than the minor issue of the system not recognizing the 40 G hard drives I put in it, it works fine.

Now the next step is to max it out with as many drives as possible to expand my fileserver storage (or move it). Atic.ca is selling 320G drives for about $84 each, which means for just over $500 I can get 1.6 terabytes, or if I go for the 500G for $135, I get 2.5 terabytes.

That’d last me for at least another six months 🙂