Things have really moved on in terms of storage. Not so long ago the largest hard drive you could buy for a home PC was a 200GB IDE. Today, 1TB SATA hard drives are available for less than £100 from my favourite hardware website .

I'll admit that I couldn't resist for long and as I've got a tower PC with 6 IDE hard disks in which are not doing anything at present it was just too much of a lure and I've ordered up 4 1TB disks.
The plan is to replace four of the IDE disks with these 1TB SATA drives and I've bought the necessary SATA drive bays to making swapping them out easier if needed.

As the motherboard is quite old I also purchased two SATA cards which will be able to handle the SATA disks.

The tower also has two IDE disks on an IDE expansion card. This was originally for the OS but I'm going to pull that
and put one of the SATA cards in it's place. The IDE disks are small (either 10 or 20GB) which I'm going to bin and replace with two 250GB IDE disks.

In total the box will have about 4.5TB raw storage capability. I need to configure the 4 SATA drives as RAID 5 in case of a failure. I also want to configure the two 250GB IDE's as RAID1 for the same reason but testing in in VMWare showed it wasn't quite that easy.

The operating system of choice will be This OS supports all sorts of storage options including CIFS, NFS and iSCSI. It's free and actually supports more than some hardware solutions such as the Buaffalo terrastation I recently bought!

Even so, When finished and configured with the RAID arrays the box should be able to support an impressive 3.2 or so TB or usable storage.

OpenFiler.