I'm using some older hardware and am set up great with 3 1.5TB Seagate drives. Loving everything so far. I just came into possession of a bunch (11 or so) of 2.5" sata hdd's mostly 160GB, one of them is 500GB. My old motherboard only has 4 SATA connections on it. Does anyone have any ideas on the best way to utilize these drives? I have to keep costs as low as possible but at the same time rather than buy junk I'd prefer just to wait a little bit to save up for decent hardware if it's a little pricier. Thanks for your suggestions!

If the speed was ok, you might be able to use one or two of the 500GB as cache or other drives.  Spending money on SATA cards to install 160G drives seems counterproductive.  Especially considering all of them combined is less than a $100 2T drive.

Sounds about right. Thanks. I"ll probably have to get a SATA card anyway if I want to add in a few of my other drives and get cahce. But perhaps I should just get a beter MOBO so I can support something more than my core 2 duo 2ghz. I know I'm going to want to be doing some video transcoding, although it appears the airvideo plugin isn't updated for the version on my iphone. </ramble>