Foolish project: an embedded fault tolerant disk array

Hi all,

Sorry for cross-posting but I am not too sure of where the knowledge hides...

I have a foolish project: I am trying to build a fault tolerance DAS (direct attached storage). That's a good embedded project I think!

Basically, the idea is to have a box, a bunch of disks, some kind of x86 board/miniboard, an ieee-1394 / usb2 interface and some kind of linux (macro)code to do software RAID and drive the interface so as to present the box as a disk device to another computer.

The idea behind the idea is that OEM fault tolerance disk enclosures cost much (between 1000 and 2000 EUR w/o disks), and may be some hardware things can be emulated through software for cheaper. Besides those "hardware things" may not be so hardware and have linux microcode!

It would be like a portable disk, only of bigger capacity and fault tolerant. This is because I had some external drives I used to take from computer to computer, and one drive recently had a failure and I lost data. Since then I wished it had been fault tolerant.

I think that the problem may interest many soho users that have the same need for flexible (ie not server based) but fault tolerant data storage.

There's no shortage a litterature about how to create a NAS with the help of Samba, but I cannot find any information about how to create et DAS, which is the same thing, only the host discusses with a device at the SCSI level, not TCP/IP, therefore you save the TCP/IP stak overhead.

Some fellows (Marc Reining in comp.hardware) say it is impossible because the USB interface of a PC board can only be a host (not a device) so it would be a hardware dead-end. But I am not too sure of specialized embedded boards (that's why I am posting here).

Besides, ieee 1394 is bidirectionnal (host to host) so there should be a possibility to present it as a slave, sending the appropriate SCSI blabla.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance to all embedded, scsi, and hardware taming enthusiasts!

Eric

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