Recommendations for external IDE storage

[Michael Hipp]

Jason Joines wrote:
>     We have a very limited budget but woulld like to get the drives back 
> into use.  I have a USB 2 card with 4 ports.  I would like to get these 
> four 160 GB drives into a 640 GB linux software raid-0.
> 
>     Does anyone know of a four drive external case that will connect via 
> USB?  If not, will plugging in 4 separate 1-drive USB cases and raiding 
> them togethere work?  Would firewire be better?  The server itself is a 
> Dell 2450 with SuSE Linux 8.0 and kernel 2.4.18.

Late reply to this thread ...

I did a bit of Googling on this as it is of interest to me too.

I found a couple of articles that seem to say it is definitely possible 
to do RAID on USB. USB looks like SCSI so it's no surprise it works.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6412
http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-isp@lists.debian.org/msg10472.html

(The first is generic RAID; the second deals with USB specifically.)

Wasn't able to find any multi-drive USB external enclosures.

I'll have a pair of USB drives in here probably next week sometime, I 
may try setting them up as a RAID 1.

Michael