Cheap Home Backup Server 1.28TB & Counting

UPDATE: It is no more, I have replaced this with 2x 1TB Hitachi external drives “Video Uploaded Soon”. They are very cheap at only $179 each on eBay. They will be connected to the main pc to backup & distribute media throughout my home. One of the 500GB drives is now in my replaytv & the other one will most likely be put in an external usb case.

About two years ago I bought five old Dell Optiplex computers that came from FCCJ with monitors & keyboards for only $30 each. I decided to use one as a cheap home backup server, So I bought two 500gb Seagate drives & crammed the rest of it with all of the spare large drives I had lying around. I have 7 hard drives running in it now which gives me 1.28TB, I do use it as a movie server to my XBMC & DLP projector. It can be expanded up to 24 hard drives as I am using the two on board Ide controllers as well as Maxtor ATA 133 pci cards which add four IDE slots a piece. The DVD drive is also network shared for my slim 3110ct portege laptops that do not have DVD/CD drives. I used the 6gb drive that came with the system for the OS Boot & merged the existing drives with XP Pro’s Disk Manager. After running out of places to mount the drives “The two 500gb drives are mounted to the bottom of the case with screws” I started using the plastic shells that samsung hard disks come in, Just cutting out the plastic where the cables go. A really nice thing is the push button case which makes it easy to open up & add more storage. Maybe not very pretty but cheaper & alot more storage than a Drobo… You can see me backing up my hacked XBOX with Cute FTP & I use Cobian Backup 8 Which is FREE to backup all of the pc’s.

Ok, Heres how I built this.

First off any computer say before the year 2001 or so may need a ATA 133 pci card that can be bought on eBay for about $10 That’s because older computers won’t see drives larger than 137GB. Each card can have up to eight IDE drives.

Next of course install XP & card drivers.
Then right click on “My Computer” go to manage & then “Disk Management” which is in the left pane. You’ll see all connected hard disks, To merge them all into a large drive just right click & convert them to “Dynamic disks” Then right click on the 1st Dynamic disk & choose “New Volume” Set it as a spanned volume. Then add the other drives you wish to have as part of the “Big Drive” that your making using the check boxes. Format them with NTFS. You will see the drives as one large drive under my computer. From there you just share it over the network.

Total Cost:

About $300 including the hard drives used. Over time I will pull out the smaller drives & use all Seagate 500GB seeing that they are only $109 on newegg they seem to be the best price for 500GB Drives.

Drives used “NTFS”

1. 6GB – XP Pro Boot
2. 250GB – Storage – Maxtor – Old Spare
3. 500GB – Storage – Seagate – New
4. 500GB – Storage – Seagate – New
5. 40GB – Storage – Maxtor – from ReplayTv
6. 40GB – Storage – Maxtor – from ReplayTv
7. 80GB – Storage – Maxtor – from old pc

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