SCSI Advice Needed!

[RabidRodents]

Hello!

I have 6 x (10kRPM)(SCSI)(9.2gig) drives, pictured below

The machine I ripped them out of (IBM Netfinity 3000) had the controller card on the motherboard. I want to hook them up to my modern computer. Is this possible or even worth it? Thanks

 

[The Spyder]

Not even close to being worth it.

 

[RabidRodents]

Not even close to being worth it.

Awww

Any more opinions?

 

[thebeephaha]

Not worth it. Slow, loud, LOUD, hot, slow, lots of cables etc.

Off to ebay I say.

 

[Dually]

The SCSI controller, cable, and terminator required for that generation of drives should be rather inexpensive (aka cheap) on eBay The real problem lies in the fact that the drives have an 80 interface and are intended for use in a hot swap drive cage.

I use the backplane from an 8 drive cage on my bench to test and low level 80 pin drives. Assuming that you just want to "toy" with them ... would suggest that you get a hold of the backplane from a drive cage (perhaps from the discarded server that orignally housed the drives) and a low end PCI SCSI Contoller ... then you can find out that they are noisy, hot, and slow compared to the latest generation of drives!

 

[irrision]

Toss them, you have probably could raid together a couple thumb drives and get better performance than those and not have to listen to the sound of them whining and waste money on a scsi raid card and sca adapters.

 

[rays87turbo]

If you're just playing, you can use them fine. They're rather small/old, and probably have alot of hours on them, so I wouldn't store anything vital on them. Very good full featured U160 RAID cards can be had on ebay for about $30 shipped. I'd recommend HP/Compaq, as I've had good luck with their controllers, and they have good drive failure recognition capabilities. My Dell PERC 4/DC kept crashing on me and killing my arrays, I bought an HP 6402, and it told me right off that one of the drives I was using was in "urgent need of replacement"...or something like that.
I've never had an issue with the sound of U160 or U320 drives. They still perform just fine IMHO certainly better than any IDE stuff. People here hate on SCSI stuff alot...and I'll admit its terrible as far as $/GB goes, but they are fast and fun to play with.
Keep in mind that most of the U160 RAID controllers are PCI-X, but they'll work in normal PCI slots, though not as fast.
You can get SCA adapters which will adapt the 80-pin to a 68 pin and a molex power connector. I've had really good luck with these.
You could also get a hot swap cage that out of a server as mentioned by someone else above. I pulled a U160 cage out of an old Compaq ML370 (dual slot 1 PIIIs) because it used a standard 68 pin internal SCSI connector, and 2 molex connectors for power, and it held 6 drives.

 

[Dually]

I've never had an issue with the sound of U160 or U320 drives.

I've actually grown found of it over the years ... something reasuring about walking by the rack and hearing the SCSI drives chattering at you ... darn my eyes are tearing up.

They still perform just fine IMHO certainly better than any IDE stuff. People here hate on SCSI stuff alot...and I'll admit its terrible as far as $/GB goes, but they are fast and fun to play with.

Agree ... if you have never configured SCSI drives, you have a few spare bucks, and you have a few spare moments ..then you just might enjoy toying with them ... they are 10K drives with 2.99mSEC Average Latency ... who knows you may be drawn to the "darkside" (SCSI/SAS) ...