bornl33t spreading the l33t to you

With my ever-growing storage needs at home, I've run into the problem that powering drives with an internal PSU is not only ugly but inefficient and risky. Rather than buy a huge case that has horrid cooling and is very noisy, it would be optimal if I placed these drives outside of their case on their own power. I've done this once before but the 4x SATAII connectors is fugly and difficult to manage. I have finally found a solution however... Multilane converters :)

Baselines

These components are the essentails for expansive storage. I'll include the drive pricing later.
Multi-lan Adapters (cheaper than HW raid) 2 for $59.06
8 Bay SATA/SAS external bay (Trayless!) 1 for $390.00
OR 8 Bay SATA/SAS external bay (with trays) for $529.00
8 port SATA-II card for only $95.00
Bringing the baseline total to $544.06 or $683.06 with out shipping or drives. SATA cables are easy to come by since you get two or more with every motherboard so they won't be included in the pricing.

Adjustments

We can really start toying with the price at this point...

Using PCI-e instead of PCI-X

Costs go up to ~$200 For either two 4 port cards or a single 8-port card. So at this time, I still see no reason to upgrade to PCI-e on my home NAS server.

Expansive Capacity

Oh boy...how much storage should I jump for? Using a very picky search I think it would be the most cost effective to use 500GB drives from WD. Blah blah, I don't care if you don't like WD or not. I've had a wide array of drives and they are basically all the same...they die when you have too many on an internal PSU.
WD 500GB drives or Seagate 500GB drives for $105 each.
Starting out with just 4 drives (2TB drives maybe the same price when we run out of space here!), this puts us at $420 for the drives, w/o shipping.

Total Costs (+/-)

Total costs with 4 drives using PCI-X with out shipping costs comes to...
$544.06 + $420 = $964.06
OR $683.06 + $420 = $1103.06
Painful, but at least I have upgrade capacity and stable spindles sucka!