[geeks] Rack-mount SCSI...

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, August 27, 2001 at 11:42:26 (-0500), Mike Hebel wrote: ]
> Subject: [geeks] Rack-mount SCSI...
>
> Anybody interested in this?
> 
> http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1268436719

Not bad price-wise for a narrow SE -- at least it has apparently good
power supplies and cooling (but no rails with it).

If you've got a bit more money for something like that though this is
what you want:

    http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1267207558

If I had the cash on hand I'd buy that unit in a flash!!!

Meanwhile I've finally got my kingston 10-bay hot-swap unit powered up.
It was a previous e-bay score a couple of years ago ($155[usa]+shipping).

The only problems were it didn't come with any power supplies, the
hot-swap bays are (wide) differential, and it is about 0.25" too wide to
fit between the uprights in a standard 19" cabinet (never mind space
officially needed for rails) but it'll just barely sit behind the
uprights with all bays accessible between them.  (I don't know who they
OEM'ed it for, but it's kinda weird that it's just over-spec....)

I found a whomping big power +5/+12/+-18 supply at a local surplus
dealer ($35), mounted it in an old 4u blank chassis I had, finally found
the right molex connectors ($15) for the power harness ($15 each for
three spools of new 16ga. wire, of which there's obviously lots left),
built the power harness, and away she went!

If I billed myself my own hourly rate for the time I've wasted^Wpoured
into this project (>40 hrs), plus the cost of parts (above) and the
drives and adaptec card (a real steal at $150 total), cables and
terminator (new, $200), I think could easily have bought that IBM unit
above, brand new, full of brand new drives!  I'm so proud of it though
that I wish I had a digital camera just to show y'all some pictures of
it!  ;-)

Seems to be something wrong with one bay at the moment (it gives parity
errors when probing the drive), but seven of the other bays are very happy!

sd6 at scsibus2 target 0 lun 0: <QUANTUM, XP34550WD, LYK8> SCSI2 0/direct fixed
sd6: 4341 MB, 5899 cyl, 10 head, 150 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 8890760 sectors
sd6: sync (100.0ns offset 8), 16-bit (20.000MB/s) transfers, tagged queueing
sd7 at scsibus2 target 1 lun 0: <QUANTUM, XP34550WD, LYK8> SCSI2 0/direct fixed
sd7: 4341 MB, 5899 cyl, 10 head, 150 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 8890760 sectors
sd7: sync (100.0ns offset 8), 16-bit (20.000MB/s) transfers, tagged queueing
sd8 at scsibus2 target 2 lun 0: <QUANTUM, XP34550WD, LXY4> SCSI2 0/direct fixed
sd8: 4341 MB, 5899 cyl, 10 head, 150 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 8890760 sectors
sd8: sync (100.0ns offset 8), 16-bit (20.000MB/s) transfers, tagged queueing
sd9 at scsibus2 target 3 lun 0: <QUANTUM, XP34550WD, LXY4> SCSI2 0/direct fixed
sd9: 4341 MB, 5899 cyl, 10 head, 150 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 8890760 sectors
sd9: sync (100.0ns offset 8), 16-bit (20.000MB/s) transfers, tagged queueing
sd10 at scsibus2 target 5 lun 0: <QUANTUM, XP34550WD, LXY4> SCSI2 0/direct fixed
sd10: 4341 MB, 5899 cyl, 10 head, 150 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 8890760 sectors
sd10: sync (100.0ns offset 8), 16-bit (20.000MB/s) transfers, tagged queueing
sd11 at scsibus2 target 6 lun 0: <QUANTUM, XP34550WD, LYK8> SCSI2 0/direct fixed
sd11: 4341 MB, 5899 cyl, 10 head, 150 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 8890760 sectors
sd11: sync (100.0ns offset 8), 16-bit (20.000MB/s) transfers, tagged queueing
sd12 at scsibus2 target 8 lun 0: <QUANTUM, XP34550WD, LXY4> SCSI2 0/direct fixed
sd12: 4341 MB, 5899 cyl, 10 head, 150 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 8890760 sectors
sd12: sync (100.0ns offset 8), 16-bit (20.000MB/s) transfers, tagged queueing

With one drive as a hot spare in a NetBSD RAIDframe RAID-5 array that
gives me a nice shiny new, fat and fast, /home:

	Filesystem 1K-blocks     Used    Avail %Cap Mounted on
	/dev/raid0a 21879470  2982318 18459562  13% /home

Along with my other two little hardware raid arrays I now officially
have more disk space than I know what to do with (productively!), but if
anyone's got any more of those (or similar spec or better) wide
differential drives going for real cheap, please let me know!

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods at acm.org>     <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>;   Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>