Reply 20 of 23, by xjas
- Rank
- l33t
Storage!
HELL YES.
I actually have stacks of those Adaptec 29160 SCSI cards. Just about every desktop PC I own has one, from my P233MMX to i7 at work to this thing (except for the PCI-X G5 because Adaptec/Apple never supported these cards on G5 for some reason...) They're PCI-X cards but they work fine in 32-bit PCI slots too. But SCSI drives themselves seem to be getting harder and harder to come by as they mostly get retired from industry and shredded or destroyed to protect "sensitive data" that nobody cares about, so mostly the SCSI cards are just adding boot time and wasting space.
Anyway finally I got my hands on some:
...a matched pair of 73GB, 10k RPM Cheetahs to be exact. Niceeeeee.
In they went. Everything powered up smooth & was readily detected by the system. First try!
But HOLY crap, it was already loud (and could ventilate a room) with its dual Xeon coolers and quad case fans. Add these things in and it's like listening to funny cars race fighter jets. Hopefully the overall drone will be lessened a bit when I close the case.
BTW it occurs to me I never showed a clear pic of what this thing looks like with everything installed. Well, here you go:
Yeah, yeah, this isn't exactly artisanal cable management. I'll tidy it up later in final assembly. Maybe.
Anyway seeing as these are old server drives from a machine that was sitting god-knows-where for 15 years and was ready to be junked, I figured I'd better use the SCSI ROM drive check utility to look for errors.
None found! My drives are healthy. 😎 The disk check took about 45 minutes per drive, and there was a nice progress meter displayed as it was doing it.
Then I decided to do a low-level format, just to make sure everything's fresh. These are *very* fast drives on an Ultra-160 card (albeit running in 32-bit mode), so how long could it possibly take? An hour ?? Here's what that process looks like:
Are you kidding me.
(It actually took closer to three hours. Per drive. It's still doing the second one and I'm going to bed now. I'm glad electricity's cheap here ...)
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