[ale] SCSI help

[Taylor Robison]

I'd recommend :

www.hypermicro.com

They sell a lot of scsi hardware.  I've bought a few drives from them 
and have had good luck.

I have a JMR drive enclosure and really like it.  It has a backplane, so 
I use SCA drives.  I've found I can get sorta older SCA drives for 
pretty cheap.  ex. 18 gig 15k rpm SCA IBM drive for $189, which is 
pretty good for a SCSI drive.

The enclosure has a big ass blower in it and is pretty loud, so if you 
are bothered by such things you may want to stay away from the enclosure 
idea.  With it under a desk a couple feet away its ok for me, but I wish 
it was a little quiter.  The performance is great though.  SCSI beats 
the pants off IDE in my book no matter what hardware review sites say.

The setup is thus:

My adaptec card has a 68 pin port on the outside.  This has a cable 
going from it to a 68 pin connector on the back of the enclosure.  The 
enclosure has 4 bays with 80 pin SCA connectors in it.  The drives live 
in drive sleds and plug into the 80 pin SCA connectors.  On the back of 
the enclosure are some switches that allow me to easily set the SCSI id 
of each drive bay.  It was very easy to setup.

So, to address the origional issue:

positves:

easy to set and change scsi ids...no jumpers
good cooling
hot swapable
good price on drives....maybe
its very geeky and cool to have an external scsi enclosure
can easily hook the enclosure to multiple machines...oooo!

negatives:

loud
takes up more space
enclosure costs money, bay in pc case doesn't

Take a look at ebay....there are a few people selling new enclosures 
with new drives for ok prices.  There are also many older used SCSI disk 
systems floating around that might be worth a try.  You might get lucky 
and find a great deal.  Or you might get screwed...hehehe...such is the 
beauty of ebay.  I picked up a 72 gig SCSI array for $400 a year or so 
ago and its done great.

Taylor



James P. Kinney III wrote:

>The main use for SCA is in a hot swap setup. The SCA plugin has data,
>power, and SCSI-ID connectors. They are also less expensive than the
>drives with separate plug/sockets/jumpers. There are adapters for SCA to
>"normal" SCSI/power/ID. 
>
>Do you need hot swap capabilities? If you're on this list, OF COURSE YOU
>DO!! What a silly question :)
>
>Realistically, hot swap is useful for mission critical, RAID setups
>only. Even really high-end home hobbyist can live well without hot swap
>drives.
>
>On Wed, 2002-06-19 at 22:47, Dennis Herrick wrote:
>
>> 
>>
>>>SCA Really isn't a cable interface, it's more for 
>>>drive-to-backplane. 
>>>
>>Maybe I worded my question poorly... Is there an advantage to getting an
>>external case with the backplane and then getting 80 pin drives? Or just
>>stick with the standard 68 U160 cables and drives?
>>
>>
>>---
>>This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
>>See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
>>sent to listmaster at ale dot org.
>>



---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.