help building a PC that can image a dozen hard drives simultaneously

Posted by Bigbio2002 on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Bigbio2002
Published on 2011-01-04T02:12:34Z Indexed on 2011/01/04 2:55 UTC
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hard-drive

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disk-cloning

Not sure if this belongs on here or SuperUser, but here goes...

I'm trying to figure out how to make a mass hard drive imaging PC out of COTS parts. A dedicated imaging device can do 10 drives at a time, but costs several thousand dollars. So far, I'm thinking to use several 3-port PCI-E Firewire cards, and use some kind of Firewire-to-IDE adapter to connect the drives themselves. The "software" would consist of scripting diskpart, or some other imaging utility.

The problem is that I can't seem to find any sort of adapter. I could use standard external hard drive bays, but then I'd have a dozen power cables that I need to plug in. Ugly, messy, and inefficient. I picked Firewire over USB not only for better transfer speeds, but also because FW can deliver power over the bus (and could theoretically power a hard drive). Does anyone have any input on this?

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