hi everyone... OK i've just gotten my hands on a old flight data recorder. those orange rectangular boxes and \I have plans for it. Not too keen on another mini pc since I already have a mac mini for it. my plans for it is simple, I want it to remain as close as possible to its blackbox roots such that it will contain a few HDDs that will serve as a backup for either my nas or my pc itself. the question is, what are the ways that I can connect a number of HDDs via a single cable to my pc? mini-sas cable? that would require a raid card in the pc and I might not have the space for another pci-e card. not to mention cost of a simple raid card. usb 3.0? sata to usb is easy to get but only serves 1 HDD. anyway to link multiple drives to one usb cable? ethernet cable. is there anyway besides tearing apart a nas to connect the drives to one ethernet cable? other solutions?
For flexibility (which is what you want in a backup system) go with USB 3.0. It's more than fast enough for backup purposes. So route a single USB 3.0 cable from PC to 'black box' and then 'basically' use external drives inside the box (Or their circuits), with multiple drives plugged into a hub. This way you've not gone esoteric so everything will work, and it'll work quite happily in your new PC / laptop when your old PC dies... the one time you actually need to use the backup! Don't go with SATA multipliers and the like as it'll mean getting access to your backed up data is harder than it should be. Is the black box big enough to install all this? Pics?
