Homeless SCSI Drives...

[Vince77]

Greet's from Jersey,

I just inherited 12 older 9G SCSI drives and was wondering if there was even a point to putting these into a tower with a controller. Truth is they were probably free for a reason but then people are still using 486's for crying out loud, so why not ask.
I got 6 Seagate ST39173W's and 6 IBM OEM drives with a p/n of 22L0231. All 9 GB and 7200rpm. An hour in the net has taught me the difference between the 80 pin ultra2 IBM drives and the 68 pin Segates, but WTF does that mean?
If someone can give me a good use for half of them, I'll sell you the other six for a buck. Bear in mind I'm wickedly content with my subnotebook, so I obviously don't do the Halflife/ Age of/ Dragon/ whatever thing... but maybe there is a use for htese after all...

 

[DJ-CHRIS]

Hook them all up and use them as your primary drives since that's 12x 9 gig of SCSI ownage

 

[Vince77]

Hmm... 108GB or maybe 54, all humming in a tower the size of a 36 in. TV, and probably running on a pair of 500 watt power supplies. I might do it just to say I have. Maybe I'll throw together a server and get my web store off of IPower web (it's the wifeÂ’s home business so please don't ask) Do you guys know if 7200 rpm SCSI drives can be made that quick anyway?

 

[DJ-CHRIS]

I dont get what your asking at the end, "if they can be made that quick"

SCSI drives are fast but since those ones are old, they wont be the fastest anymore.

Also remeber, power bill

 

[Panther5060]

yes chris, power bill!!!

thatll be one hell of a surprise come the beginning of next month...

dododo *opens bill* SIX-HUNDERED DOLLARS?!?!?!?

lol

 

[Vince77]

haha, what power bill? I'm livin' on uncle sams dime here. If the AC is too cold I just open a few windows
Well I'm not that bad. I was just wondering if they can be made fast enough to bother setting them up, maybe in a media server for my home net. Although the 7200rpm 100G drive that does that now keeps up just fine even if all three of us are pulling from it... What sort of throughput could I expect from the fastest setup of these old drives?

 

[horndude]

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/scsi/st39173w.html

about 40mb/sec

 

[Sport1031]

Hook 6 of them up for 54GB of High-speed transfer, and sell the other 6 to me.

 

[Samm]

The difference, if you're still interested, between 80pin & 68pin SCSI drives is this:

68 pin is your standard ultra wide interface
80 pin (known as SCA interface) is designed primarily for servers because SCA drives are hot swappable & designed to be installed in caddies for this purpose.

 

[Vince77]

So a controller and back plane for the 80 pin drives will cost me 8x that of a controller and tower for the 68 pin drives... Tough call. Good to know. I hit that page horndude, but I got distracted before I read far enough to catch that spec. Maybe I should sit on the 68 pin drives for now and invest in an attention span.