Homeless SCSI Drives...

[Samm]

No, you can buy a sca-to-68 pin converter. This simply connects to the rear of the drive & allows it to be connected to a normal 68pin scsi cable. It also provides the power connecter (SCA drives as you've probably noticed don't have a seperate power connector like normal drives cos of the hot-swappable thing).

The one below is only £4 :

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=1955

 

[Vince77]

Four quid eh? I closed my pound account when I left East Anglia. Spent a year in Waterbeach just up the A10 from Cambridge. Way better place than New England, but still no match for San Diego. I probably should have specified that I live in New Jersey, not the original... Alright then, Dude pick a number between one and ten, Samm pick two numbers. Whoever gets it can have the six 80 pin IBM drives for shipping plus one dollar (60 pence).

Cool or foul?

 

[Samm]

Thats very generous but I suspect the shipping costs from New Jersey to England may be little steep!

 

[Vince77]

haha, that never even crossed my mind. We send flat rate global priority envelopes over to England and Norway all the time for like nine bucks. I'll have to think about that one...

 

[Vince77]

Wicked things afoot. My buddy with a Gateway server put the SCA drives one at a time on rails and into his drive cage. they all spun up and filled up to balance his array, or at least that's what he said it did... It's pretty scary to watch someone pull a drive out of a running computer and throw in a blank one without even closing his e-mail. Problem is that only two of the Seagate drives spun up properly. He was using an older controller, but I thought most SCSI equipment was supposed to be backwards and forewards compatible...?

 

[Samm]

( He was using an older controller, but I thought most SCSI equipment was supposed to be backwards and forewards compatible...?

Yes & no....a lot of 68 pin scsi drives, for example, are LVD (low voltage differential) & so require a lower voltage from the controller. They usually have a jumper that allows them to work with HVD controllers (or SE mode) but obviously that must be set otherwise the drive will fail.

So if your friend has an older controller, it probably won't have LVD capabilities. I'm guessing a bit though as I don't know whether your drives were LVD or not.

Theres plenty of other reasons for the drives not to be recognised, such as incorrect termination or more commonly, non-unique identifiers being set. All drives on a chain must have unique number between 0 and 7 or 0 & 14 depending on the scsi level used. ID 7 is normally used for the controller itself. If 2 devices on a single chain have the same ID set, only one or neither of the devices will be recognised.

 

[desiboi]

Also remeber, power bill

CFLs? Ever heard of them? They are special low wattage light bulbs that produce lots and lot sof lumens.

 

[Vince77]

Cool. So I got 6 good drives and 6 plug and pray ones... Only problem is that I can get a decent 200GB drive that can live in my current desktop for a fourth of what it would cost me to get 100GB out of these... I need to get friends who give away better stuff. So is a SCSI array just an ego thing unless you're running a file server or crunching video?