I am starting to plan a replacement for my Dell PowerEdge 2300 and its RAID array. I am running out of space on the array and the combination of difficulties involved in extending the array and the fact that adding two extra 18Gb disks won't gain me much space is leading me to consider replacing the whole thing.

What I would like to do is replace it with a fanless mini-itx based machine (so I could then move it back indoors from the garage). There is no room of course in a mini-itx machine however for more than one disk.

I hadn't realised until today that you could use SATA on external drives. External SATA would seem to present a good solution, I can have a small boot drive inside the case and 2 or 3 external fanless drive enclosures (with the size of drives available now I might just for for two disks in RAID 1 rather tha 3 disks in RAID 5).

I would use a RocketRaid card or something similar. The box would be running either Win2k3 or Linux (most likely Win2k3 though as the photo album code I an writing is in ASP.NET).

Does this make any sense, has anyone here had any experience of external SATA ?

Are these cheap RAID cards like the RocketRaid totally hardware based like the PERC in my Dell or are they partly hardware and partly software ?

P.S. my current RAID array is going to be a pain to expand because I need to get all the firmware and drives upto date before expanding the NTFS volume will work. It seems to include updating the firmware for just about every piece of hardware in the box, in the right order, so to be honest I am too scared to attempt it. For the same reason I never have got round to fitting the second processor I bought on ebay.

What is your timeframe and do you want to buy a SOHO or a more corporate solution (I know it is for your home)?

For alternative ways of doing this...

IC Intracom have this: http://www.icintracom.com/merchant.ihtml?pid=4395&lastcatid=:id&step=4 but I believe it is PATA. IC Intracom uses OEMs for most of its stuff, so you might find the likes of Tritton, Claxon and IOGear offering virtually identical products.

Buffalo are bringing out the TeraStation - this is believed to be SATA with RAID 0,1,5 (in software?), but no-one really seems sure.

Time frame is probably 3-6 months, it will take me a while to get around to doing it.

I want more than just a NAS box. The server that I am replacing does more than just serve files. The server that it is replacing is a Windows box, so it is 99% certain that the new box will be also Windows box (I need a Windows server running here and I already have a Linux server that I am not planning to replace at this time).

I think all these multi drive enclosures are overkill for what I want. I was thinking of using 2 or 3 ICY BOX single drive enclosures. That way the whole system would end up completely fanless.

http://www.planetmicro.co.uk/product_info.asp?stockcode=M003740

It means I will end up with a power supply for the server and one each for every enclosure, but that is worth it if the whole setup is fanless.