Currently I’m working on rebuilding our web storage infrastructure for our District. Currently we have 6 XRAID’s that have 40,000+ hours on the drives and aren’t currently being used right now. I was in need of DAS to setup my Gluster Cluster, so I decided repurposing these would be the cheapest and most efficient solution.
As some of may know, XRAID’s support up to 750GB per drive and require IDE drives. Finding a 750GB is fairly easy, finding a abundance of these, not so much. When you do find these drives, they usually range from $150-250 per drive. So, I started to do some research to see what is out there. I ran across one article on replacing the drives with notebook drives and IDE to SATA adapter. I then decided to try it out, ordered up one Startech IDE to SATA adapter and a Seagate Momentum 750gb 7200rpm notebook drive.
The parts arrived, I got to work. Connected up the adapter and power splitter. Connected the drive, and found that I could throw in one screw and some tape to hold the power in place, and then we were all done. Slid the module into the XRaid and we were on our way.
We are currently in process of getting this all ordered and running, I’ll post up any updates on the process.
Parts:
