SCSI

[Spike]

ive recently come accross a card with a drive on a popular auction site and im wondering if i got a good deal

its an adaptec 39160 card
and a seagate cheetah 18gig @ 10K rpm

all for £31 + postage

howd i do?

[orudge]

For the two of them, not bad I'd say. SCSI drives are generally expensive. The drive is a bit small by modern standards though, I guess. What do you have in mind for it?

[hr]

http://www.owenrudge.net/
http://standrews.facebook.com/profile.php?id=37103734

[Spike]

well i was thinknig of using the drive for windows (as its a bit faster than my 5400 RPM 20gig hdd form abt 4 years ago) and then maybe some core applications on it to speed it all up
also the main expense in SCSI as far as i could tell was the controller cards

[Traveller]

Assuming you wave the dead chicken the right way over the SCSI cable when you're plugging it in, and it actually works, then £31 is not an unreasonable price, even just for a decent controller card and the cable.

You can never tell just how "used" a second-hand hard drive like this really is: "Formated,Tested, Wokring 100%" isn't much of a description. It might have been run flat out in an overheating server for the past four years, and be all set to fail tomorrow. I wouldn't trust it for anything I wanted to keep long-term - especially not your OS and applications - and even with a decent tape backup.

But it would still do well enough for temporary files, such as the Windows swapper, unfinished downloads, ripping and burning CDs and DVDs, or anything else that will take load off your main hard drive but won't break the machine altogether when the SCSI drive suddenly dies. 18Gb is plenty large for something like this.

[Spike]

what im thinknig is that il raid 1 it with another drive as a precaution for failure

the drive will be an IDE 18gig partition or something like that...will it work?

[Tryptophan]

Quoting Spike from 13:26, 9th Oct 2006
what im thinknig is that il raid 1 it with another drive as a precaution for failure

the drive will be an IDE 18gig partition or something like that...will it work?

Hmm, Don't think so. A) you'd need win2k3 server to get softraid mirroring (not that this is necessarily a bad thing ) and B) the second disk would need to be at least as fast as the cheetah, otherwise windows will be stuck waiting for the slow disk all the time, negating your gains. Best thing would be to run weekly and/or daily incremental backups to a 40G partition on another disk overnight. its quite unlikely that both the cheetah and another disk will drop at the same time. Anyways, it'd only be your OS/apps. sure the savegames might get lost ( unless you included them in the backup) but it only takes a couple of hours to get a base OS back up, then restoring the backup will put the rest of it back together.

If you go Hardware raid then tbh, you might as well just buy a brand-new atlas-II or fujitsu MAU and use that with the knowledge that it's not been too badly thrown about/burnt/magnetised etc.

[Spike]

well its all arrived but i probably wont have time to install it to my system till saturday.

full update then if anyone is interested