After upgrading everyone here at the office, I have a few dozen pc's p3's laying around. What are the possiblities of putting 4 ide hard drives in each of them and using the pc's as some kind of mass storage array? Anyone with an idea on how to go about it? Thanks, Rick

I would recomend usid a RAID controler in the PC's. connect 2 HD's (all the same size) to each controler. create a stripe set with the 2 mater HDs. And mirror it to the 2 slaves. That way if you use 4 40GB HD's you will have 80GB of storage and if a drive dies you will not loss any data. Install a O/S create the shares and away you go.

If you can't afford a RAID controller there is another solution to setting up a simple stripe set just with the 2000 software. I haven't tried this myself yet so can't verify if it works or not, but it should and that's why I saved this info in my 2000 tweaks file. How To Setup A Software RAID with Windows 2000: First of all you have to install the mass storage controller(s) and hard drives you want to use. After that, launch the Windows 2000 Management Console (simply run "compmgmt.msc /s") and open the Disk Management Folder inside the Storage category. The lower frame at the right displays all drives and their partitions. Before you can create a stripeset you have to remove all partitions on the drives that you want to use (right-click the partition to get the options menu). Now you have to convert those drives into dynamic drives. Right-click the field left to the partition area and select "Convert To Dynamic Drive". After restarting the system (required), you can right-click on the partition area of any drive you want in order to create a new partition. The Wizard allows you to create simple partitions as well as span or stripe the drives. Next, specify the sector size and disk label, have it automatically formatted, and you are ready to go.