take a look at the enbeded systems board prices, they include everything
under the sun and are far mor expensive and capible then this type of
project needs.
i saw something (I think it was on ace's hardware site) over the weekend
indicating there was a new chipset for gigE running ~$100 ea, combine that
with a crusoe cpu (~$50) and some ram (say 16M for $30) you won't meet the
+$100 that larry is wanting, but you could probably get +$250 for a box
that would be a very adaquate webserver or fileserver, forget building
huge central fileserver, have a bunch of tiny network fileservers with a
way for the client to pass the connection off to another server (symlink
equivalent) how many of these could you get working on the budget of a
reasonable dual/quad server for a medium office (these machines run
$15-20K to start)
David Lang
On Sun, 13 Feb 2000, Sandy Harris wrote:
> Bjorn Wesen wrote:
>
> > I don't doubt the feasability of the HW design at all at that price. The
> > main problem is probably simply cold feet. Imagine you are a hot-shot HD
> > manufacturer. You instinctively feel "this is cool stuff", and prepare the
> > design and R&D. All is well. Until you come to think "can I even find 1
> > million customers who understands how to use this thingy?", ...
> >
> > The HD manufacturer would probably in that situation just put on the
> > ethernet interface, additional RAM, verify that it can run some OS'es,
> > then make some OEM deals with a linux server company to design and support
> > the OS and utils that will go into it. ....
>
> > One possible intermediary is to sell a small board that attaches to the
> > bottom of the drive, with a pass-through power connector and a bridge to
> > the IDE port. Would break the 3.5" form factor though.
>
> What about a board that fits in a 5 1/4" bay, leaving room for a 3.5"
> drive below it, and has ARM, VLSI IDE controller, ethernet, ...
>
> In a standard low-cost box designed for a single 5 1/4" device like
> CD-ROM or tape drive, this becomes a standalone network server. If you
> need a bunch, put them in a big case designed for a PC server or a
> RAID array.
>
> The 5 1/4" form factor gives you enough room to have connectors for
> two IDE controllers, so you can use standard motherboard chips for the
> IDE and run two drives fast or four much less so. It also allows you
> to support fairly large memory for some applications.
>
> This doesn't take a drive manufacturer. Anyone building PC motherboards
> or embedded systems could take a crack at it.
>
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