Best way to use old HDDs (use as single drive?)

[acer0169]

It's been a while since I've asked anything so let's see what the HDD gurus can come up for this one .

I, like most of you, have several old IDE drives sitting behind me on a shelf. They range from 8GB to 200GB and there's 4-5 that I know work just fine.

I don't want to clutter my gaming machine with IDE drives nor do I want to buy a crap-load of external enclosures to get them working.

I came across this picture: http://www.instructables.com/image/FT2EY12GAPUS5IZ/Awesome-Hard-Drive-Tower.jpg
And it made me wonder if there was a way I could build an external enclosure for all 5 drives that just had power and one USB to go into my computer.

Is there anyway anyone can think of doing this?
I'd prefer not have to build a shitty old server computer to house these drives but that is an option.

Let me know your thoughts - be as creative as you can.

I have never used RAID before, but is there a way to use RAID 0 (i think it is) to make them all show as one large (rather slow) drive?

 

[rolli59]

Well if you use them all as one drive and loose one you have lost the data on all! I know it is hard to let go of them but anything under 120GB to me today is not worth keeping. (I actually have a couple of them in the closet as a back up with all my digital Photos, less bothersome than a pile of CD's)

 

[acer0169]

This isn't for the storage space as I have over 3.5TB of storage on my machine. I more just want a project to built and if I can make use of these babies I will do. They make up about 400GB together. Anyway I can have these as externals and one drive?