Im gonna preface this with an "I cant find a category for this, so build a pc it is... this is technically a cluster right... that counts as a pc?". Move it where it should go if I was wrong.
So after about 3 years of cloning disks with everything from hardware cloners to linux live cd cloners to network cloning, I have come to the realization that they all kind of suck. Each one has some pros and some cons in terms of speed and reliability but they end up falling short. So I want to attempt to make my own with some off the shelf parts to get something that is portable (not be bigger than a suitcase), can do atleast 10 drives at a time, and complete a 300GB (x10) clone in less than 2 hours.
The only way I can see this happening is to use a network clone as usb-to-sata will not be fast enough and would saturate the usb bus if I used 1 device to drive all the drives. The problem now comes down to driving each drive to do the clone. I debated on using a few sbc's like raspberry pi's but they limit at 100m ethernet so they are too slow and the usb only goes to usb2 speeds iirc, so a usb 1G ethernet wont work for the application. I was looking at the Banana Pi boards but I have never used them so I'm not sure if they would be good for the task.
Basically I need a board with USB3/Sata3 and 1G ethernet, does anyone know any options that fit in this category? The idea would be to shove 11 of these into a suitcase that has a power supply, router, switch, and hdd caddies with some air cooling. Would be a beefy monstrosity but do the job nicely. I plan on ripping the clone features from trinity and making my own linux distro just for the suitcase-cloner and then setting up each slave to automatically go into slave mode and the master to go into master mode with a button on the front of the case to start the clone. I will probably replace part of the lid with an LCD connected to the master as well to monitor progress.
The last thing is budget. It all needs to be made in under $1500. I have the router and switch I want to use, so I just need the 11 SBC's and a suitcase for it all in that budget. Unless of course someone talks me out of the 11 SBC cluster and gives me another alternative that would work just as good.