[rescue] FC-AL drives on sale at geeks.com

[David Muran-de Assereto]

On Jan 8, 2008, at 17:28 , Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> On Jan 8, 2008, at 3:11 AM, Mark wrote:
>
>> On 24 Dec 2007, at 04:41, David Muran-de Assereto wrote:
>>
>>> USB - ick. I've tried that a couple of times; last time, I had a
>>> 500GB
>>> USB 2.0 drive on the Mac Pro, and the throughput was significantly
>>> lower than network I/O using CIFS over gigE.
>
> Something was bad wrong then.
>
> I get 30MB/sec on my external USB drive on a Mac Pro.
>
> However, Leopard does have a USB bug which causes drives to come up in
> 12Mbit/sec mode instead of 480, which I hope the 10.5.2 update fixes.

This was Tiger. By the time Leopard came out, I had given up and re- 
purposed the drive from the enclosure. I've had generally bad luck  
with USB peripherals, other than mice and keyboards, across hardware  
and OS platforms. The last time I tried with USB was with a couple of  
those Maxtor(?) external USB2 320Gb drives. I made sure they were on  
different busses, striped them, and was astounded by the abysmal  
performance. Then, I tried one alone, no stripe, and it was horrific.  
I got them on sale for a little less than the bare drives would have  
cost me, so no sweat - expectations confirmed, cannibalize the drives,  
toss the enclosures.

>
>
>> One word... FireWire :) I never buy an enclosure without it, and  
>> never
>> use USB 2.0 on Macs if I can help it.
>
> I have thought about building a Firewire drive to replace my external
> 500GB USB2 drive, but I don't know what kind of drive is inside, and
> taking the Seagate FreeAgent apart might not be reversible.
>
> Why do these idiots deliberately cripple their enclosures?

I've thought about buying one of those FW800 external RAID enclosures  
a couple of times, but it never makes a lot of sense, especially with  
GigE and lots of NAS available. One can never have too much disk  
space, of course, but, after populating the MacPro, it just seemed to  
be a better use of funds to buy naked drives and upgrade whatever NAS  
boxes I am running at the time.
I've considered SAN as well, and was really interested in the  
experimental low-cost FW SAN that Oracle put together, but it never  
amounted to much AFAIK, and I really have no need whatsoever for  
large, power-hungry SAN  boxes -- other than the geek factor, of course.

David Muran-de Assereto
dmuran at tuad.org

Sapere Aude!