SCSI drives

[kiddznet]

I have here several SCSI drives. I like to connect them to a PC. What is required in the way of connectors to IDE or SATA?

[seanc]

Re: SCSI drives

A SCSI card. Preferably Adaptec.

[dood]

Re: SCSI drives

You're not going to find anything to convert them to IDE or SATA. As seanc said, pick up a PCI SCSI card.

Or, if they're older drives, toss 'em. SATA is faster than the old clunker SCSI drives anyway.

[bigbeark]

Re: SCSI drives

You will need an Adaptec 29160 or 39160 card (fits in PCI slot on your mobo) and a 68-pin SCSI cable with terminator .

If the SCSI drives come from a later model server, they are probably 80-pin SCA, and you will need an adapter to convert the 80-in to 68-pin. ( 80-pin drives hot-plug directly to a backplane without a cable)

I do this all the time as I have a large number of SCSI drives on hand.

If the SCSI drives you have are 50-pin forget it. Also if the drive has "FC" on it, it's Fibre Channel. Forget that too.

SCSI drives are fast, especially the 15K rpm ones.

[pfrcom]

Re: SCSI drives

There's also more to SCSI than setting Master or Slave - you have to jumper each drive to a unique address (from 0 to 15 for 68-pin SCSI, with 7 usually allocated to the SCSI controller itself)

If the SCSI cable does not have a terminator on its end, make sure only the final device on each SCSI connection has Termination set On - all other devices must be Off

Instead of Adaptec controllers, I prefer LSI, previously called Symbios, originally called NCR

However, Adaptec documentation is perhaps more SCSI newbie friendly

[kiddznet]

Re: SCSI drives

This is one of the drives.They came out of a govt. server so they wont have done much work!

[dood]

Re: SCSI drives

If I'm reading that right.... 4.3gb 10k? I wouldn't bother.

[bigbeark]

Re: SCSI drives

I agree 4.3GB is too small to be useful. It takes 3GB or so to load an operating system. If it is a 68-pin drive you could chain several together on the cable, but even still, too small.

Show us the end where the cable connects. Also does it say on the Drive what the speed is? Some are 7200, some are 10,000 and some are 15,000 RPM. 7200 is not desirable.

If it's an 80-pin SCA drive you have to use an adapter, and are recommended to have no more than 2 drives per cable.

Also the older drives can run hot and be whiny.

Remember these things run 24/7 for up to 7 years.

The Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) of SCSI is 1.5 million hours (yes).
That's why they cost more and that's why they are kept in service so long.
At the end of their lives they can be "tired".

Compaq does not build their own drives, that one looks like a Seagate or Fujitsu. I prefer Fujitsu - cooler and quieter. Maxtor and IBM (later Hitachi)
also made SCSI drives.

[Uranium-235]

Re: SCSI drives

4.3, 10k (10000 rpm)

maybe with a HBA using linux raid 5 you can get some decent space if you put like 7 of these in, but that decent space is sill very small (25G for 7/w raid 5)

[NxB]

Re: SCSI drives

Think of all the power they consume too. Even the 36gb drives are too small. I'd wait till you get some 73gbs. They are very common.

Get a cheap jbod (hp disk system, etc) and a scsi card. These drives are very loud so even for free they might not be a good idea when a 1TB ide drive is < $70.

I have a box of FC drives of a decent size but I can't really do much with them as everything to do with them is expensive. Can't sell them because they came out of customer's servers and probably have data on them.

[Uranium-235]

Re: SCSI drives

it would be cheaper just to get two 320gb sata's in linux software raid 1

[japlytic]

Re: SCSI drives

Make sure that you use the right SCSI terminator (SE or LVD).
Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) dispenses with terminators.

[brethin]

Re: SCSI drives

Raid 0 a pair of those for 8.6G just for the OS, Raid 0 2 more for a 8.6G virtual memory swap drive, and JBOD the rest as your data storage and your set.

[NxB]

Re: SCSI drives

Sas is the way to go now if you are buying.

[dood]

Re: SCSI drives

Sas is the way to go now if you are buying.

Yup... all our servers in the last two years have been SAS drives. My main Exchange server has two 146gb SAS drives in RAID1, and 6 300gb SAS drives in RAID 10. Fast as hell .

[brethin]

Re: SCSI drives

I have here several SCSI drives. I like to connect them to a PC. What is required in the way of connectors to IDE or SATA?

Knowing how many you have exactly would help but just guessing if it 6 or more then Raid 0 a pair of those for 8.6G just for the OS, Raid 0 2 more for a 8.6G virtual memory swap drive, and JBOD the rest as your data storage and your set.

Considering they were free its crazy to say it would be cheaper to buy the other drives (SAS) etc the others mention. Speed wise and $ wise they are plenty fast enough setup as I suggested and your investment will be much less than all the other suggestions.

[brethin]

Re: SCSI drives

Sas is the way to go now if you are buying.

He isn't buying, he has several free drives, as per his post.

[brethin]

Re: SCSI drives

You're not going to find anything to convert them to IDE or SATA. As seanc said, pick up a PCI SCSI card.

Or, if they're older drives, toss 'em. SATA is faster than the old clunker SCSI drives anyway.

Not true, you can buy SCSI to Sata converters, they arn't cheap so this wouldn't be a good choice for these smaller drives.

Older 10K SCSI are still faster than 90% of the SATA drives now made (just because its a Sata drive doesn't mean its doing 1.5g or 3g transfers) the older SCSI drives spinning at 10k RPM and small like these 4.6G drives are screaming fast in a raid and will own most any SATA drives in benchmarks on the proper controller.

In fact 2 of these small 10k SCSI drives in raid 0 on a 39320 controller bench faster than 2 WD Sata 10k raptors, I know this for a fact as I have both setups.

[NxB]

Re: SCSI drives

SCSI/SAS/FC have higher sustained rates than consumer oriented things like SATA. Drives are more durable too. The 1.5/3gb rate is mostly burst.

[kiddznet]

Re: SCSI drives

Well I rummaged through the stuff I got with the server drives and I have an Adaptec SCSI PCI card 19160/29160 N but I am ,still none the wiser what I need in cables