This technology is evolving as we speak...errr...write. See this new Serial SCSI product just announced by Adaptec: http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/Htm/DVEditHomeSet1.htm

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It depends on what you are after. At the low end, purchase a PC case that can handle the number of hard drives you want, purchase the required number of SATA hard drives, a power supply if your case doesn't come with one, a cooling fan if needed.

Then for your other PC, get a PCI SATA card - one that is designed for eSATA (external SATA), you may need an extra eSATA connector that wil consume one of the card slot openings (if you want to run 4 drives). Run the cables from the back of your PC into the drive PC case and hook up to the drives.

Now you can't do hot-swapping with this arrangement, so if that's important to you, the PC case isn't going to work.

Another option is just to by some eSATA drive enclosures. I've got 2 eSATA drives that are in individual enclosures and hook up to the eSATA card in my PC. I can cable up an additional 2 drives if I want. The nice thing about the enclosures is that they accept a standard ATA drive.

I purchased everything I needed at newegg.com =- other places offer similar hardware.

I'm not sure, but, I'm fairly confident that without the internal fiber channel interface, you won't get the data transfer rates you need for HD. The limitation to copper wire is bandwidth. SATA has the requisite bandwidth in the controller, but, the data stream still has to fit thru the pipe. Copper pipe just doesn't have the data bandwidth and noise floor that fiber has and won't support the thruput from more than 2 drives. If you really need that 100Mb/sec....ya gotta have the fiber channel.

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All of the current SATA card busses I've seen, have only two channels. This allows two hard drive connections. One of the ways to get more data thru the pipe is to provide more pipes....hence 8 redundant RAID drives providing 8 pipes into one SATA channel. I haven't seen an eight channel hub, except for the fiber channel ones already integrated into the Array. If you can find a vendor for the hub/switch, with eight ports, you can build your own. Suggestion.....buy an empty 8 channel fiberchannel enclosure and populate it one hard drive at a time. But all you mitigate is your cash flow...no savings since you're not buying in quantity.

Highpoint Rocket Raid 1540 - 4 channel card. 2 internal connections (on the card), 2 external connections. Pick up a Rocket Head 100 and have 2 more external connections. Rocket Raid 1820 is an 8 channel adapter (all internal).

"If you really need that 100Mb/sec....ya gotta have the fiber channel. "

I agree fibre has a higher bandwidth than copper wires, but 100Mb/sec is easily achievable on copper, all the 100 baseT LANs use this. Heck, even Gbit ethernet runs fine on copper if the distance is not too great. And did you know fibre channel doesn't automatically mean that fibre optic cable is used for the physical layer? There are many fibre channel networks implemented using copper, as it's also covered by fibre channel standards.

Richard Hunter

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Then why don't you purchase one of those solutions from the original post?

If you factor in that your time spent finding components and assembling them is valuable, the solutions that are already assembled are not that expensive a proposition.

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http://www.thebird.org/assholes/

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Troll troll troll your boat...
Gently down the stream...

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now children....
if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.

Try troll comment was made to billyboy. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Fine, then I'll say something nice:

3ware Escalade 9000 is what you need. Supports SerialATA and hot swap with hot spares.

If you can't figure what to do from here, you're free to hire someone to do it for you or buy a solution from a vendor. Some of us are trying to make a living doing this stuff, so we can't give all the secrets away.