Well those must be noisy as hell but I imagine they have to perform like a Raptor 74GB 10k but with lower response time and slighty better write/read avg.

Anyway, 30 bucks is damn cheap for a 15k 146gb drive 😀

The price is good, but I do fear them being noisy as hell.

When I meant experience is with the controller board and driver support in Win98/DOS. Are they generally just for WinNT/WinXP usage?

I've used 15K SCSI drives so I can attest that they are noisy at that speed but when you need something loaded it loads like lightning.

The newer 15k drives with fluid-dynamic bearings aren't too bad on noise, but really, noise is the least of the concerns here. The drives are cheap for a reason... FC is enough of a hassle that nobody outside of an enterprise IT department wants to fuck with it (and enterprise IT departments don't tend to buy used drives on eBay or Craigslist).

First and foremost is the issue of cost... $30 doesn't sound bad for the drive, but you also have to factor in the controller card, cabling, and either a backplane or individual adapter boards (which are quite hard to find). I also don't believe there were many, if any, controllers that supported Win9x... FC just was never intended to be used with such systems.

Realistically, a PCI SATA card and an SSD would be easier to deal with, be faster, and would probably cost the same or less overall than a FC setup.

loud, hot, and expensive... does that sum it up?

vetz wrote:

Anyone have any experience with these kind of harddrives?

Since most enterprises are moving towards SAS drives, these should be a dime a dozen. But gotta also remember that they've probably been running 24/7 for god knows how long, so unless you're planning on running a RAID setup I wouldn't bother.

Oh and yes they do get hot, thats why servers have so many bloody fans in them.

These are FAR AND AWAY better drives to get: http://www.ebay.com/itm/290845255188

That said, SAS drives, while they look like sata REQUIRE a SAS controller. SAS controller can use SAS & SATA drives, but sata contorllers only talk to sata. sas controllers tend to be expensive. Thats why I buy them built-in on my motherboard. ^.^

Now if you are going pre-XP then you should look for 15k SCSI drives. 68-pin drives are relatively hard to find, but generally have lived a easy life compared to their SCA brothers. I currently use 4x 15k sca drives in my minecraft server. This server also sits permantly in my basement. SCA > 68-pin scsi converters are CHEAP, but are horribly unreliable.

A guy is selling 63 of them for 30 dollars a piece. 146gb drives with 15k RPM.

Is that locally or on ebay?
And if not ebay, did he have any 'normal' types (IDE/SATA) ?

Here is the ad bestemor incase you're interested yourself:

http://www.finn.no/finn/torget/tilsalgs/annon … pidEnabled=true

Only reason I'm interested in this is to have something unique. I know it's not the most practical stuff, but few things are when it comes to retro computing. The controller cards are not that expensive on Ebay even with shipping, and I haven't asked if the seller got cables as well. If the adapter cards are attachted to the drives, they seem to be intact looking at the pictures.

I already have a 4.3GB 68pin SCSI drive in my P133. I'm not very impressed by it and I've been prodding a replacement. That is why I thought maybe Fibrechannel could be cool (if it could work with DOS/Win98), but after your replies I think I need to just get a good 68/50pin SCSI drive or newer IDE. The 50pin 9GB IBM drive in my 486 performs better and is more quiet. I want another one 😜

Eeerr... that are EVA hard disks. They fit inside some storage enclosures connected to a pair of controllers and then to the PC (directly, using a fiber switch or using a fiber-to-ethernet bridge). As far as I know there is no way to put one of those inside a normal PC or server. FC HBAs will provide a way to connect to the controllers, but not to the storage directly.

If the adapter cards are attachted to the drives, they seem to be intact looking at the pictures.

Those are in drive sleds, designed to work in a storage enclosure like this. The sleds are useless without the enclosure. There are no adapters installed, and since the drives came out of such a setup, the seller isn't likely to have the cables you'd need either... those things do not use cables internally, just a backplane.

Thanks for the responses. I think this puts it out of practical reach. Over to finding some other solution either with SATA SSD or SCSI 😀

Just hope I won't regret in 10 years time if Fibrechannel is almost non-existing and very expensive 😜

Dang maybe i should have took that fibre card while i was given the opportunity. i believe with a full on fibre card you can hook straight up to the SAN.