lots of external stuff....

i'm posting this in alternative modding because i am not aware of something that exists to fit the needs of my new setup... i recently bought a shuttle xpc sn4162.

i have some hard drives and a few cdrom drives in my current PC that of course will not fit in the little case. i am asking the oc forumers what they think would be my best solution for my needs. the shuttle takes care of all my major pc tasks, but when i am at home, i would like to have as little hassle as possible "plugging" in my other drives (previous PC had a raid array of 7 drives)

the general merchants want me to buy external, single HDD boxes for almost 80 bucks a peice! i have a good lot of old CDROM drives, i could probably make my own cases, but would i need SCSI or would those nifty usb2.0 adapters be a better choice?

cd media towers are equally expensive, but the less cables you want, the more you pay, right? for the most extreme modders/inventors, what would you say would be my best bet? aside from spending hundreds of dollars thank you to anybody with some insight, this is truly a project for me

I'd say get an old POS system to act as a file server. Slap those guts in a large-ish case along with your 7 drives and set up a LAN. You could hide it away in a closet somewhere==no muss no fuss!

i had definately considered this. what would you say would be the fastest option? maybe i have been extending my reach. i was thinking more of a "box" i could place in the living room to give me access to the hd and cd drives, a closet box would be a good option except it wouldnt be the easiest to maintain at a hotel or some such place... i am not one for cables or cords, i should have worded my first post better, i am also trying to eliminate cables but the closet box is my 1st option.