External raid / network storage using IDE hard drives

Question

Here's the situation: I have numerous old hard drives, all of which are at least 120GB. I'd like to be able to combine these together into a big network share with maybe some kind of RAID option. How best to do this? I've a slightly older PC (about 2GHz) that I'd like to use as a server across my network. Ideally I'd like to be able to backup my stuff to a RAID.

Does anyone have any suggestions, words of wisdom, words of warning, etc? I find buying some additional hardware perfectly acceptable, but I don't know what to even look for. This is for a home environment. I'm proficient with Linux (which I'd prefer the server to run).

Any comments are welcome.

Answer 1

If the old machine will hold the drives (a the power supply is powerful enough) then you should just setup the machine using software RAID - it better than cheap hardware RAID controllers.

The only problem is you'll be limited to 4 drives - and for 4 drives you'll have to install from USB.

I installed onto 2 SATA drives directly from the Ubuntu 8.04 alternative CD and was pretty easy.