Gordon McLellan wrote: > Just sharing my 5 cents, > > How stringent is your requirement that this be external storage? i don't know...the OP did not say much about space in his case. > > My home server (currently at 1.25TB) is using a Super Micro SATA > hot-swap drive cage. Five drives take up three bays in a mini-server > tower (case has a total of 9 bays). I have another cage installed, > but no controller for it as of yet. I have 4 of the 5 drives > connected to onboard SATA and one connected to a pci sata controller. > The boot drive is PATA, and the cdrom is external usb2. Hot-swap > seems to work ... although I haven't tried to remove a drive hot, I > have added two. With a custom kernel and recompiling some tools, you > can add hot-growable soft-RAID5 support to Centos, or if you have the > funding, a hardware raid controller would be awesome. hardware raid that comes with bbu cache for that matter. if you can hot add two sata drives, you should be able to hot remove sata drives too. at least on opensolaris that was very easy to do. just unplug or poweroff. i suspect centos 5 to be very simple on this point. not sure about centos 4.