So ... 15000 RPM SCSI RAID setup?

[Peter.Steele]

At work they decided to scrap a bunch of servers. Unfortunately, because of some recycling credit or other, they have to send the chassis and such to the scrapheap, but they let us scavenge parts. (I'm really pissed about this - there were a beautiful pair of dual quad-core Xeon servers, one a 1U rack mount, the other a tower.)

BUT the good news is that I got the hard drives and the RAM.

I now have ... I think 14 15,000 RPM Ultra320 SCSI drives, all HP branded. 2 of them are small, like 36-point-somethingorother, but the rest are 146.8. 4 of those are SAS. I got the backplane for the SAS drives (with two empty drive carriers) and a backplane for the other type as well. (The rack mount server didn't have a separate backplane, or at least not one that would be usable in a normal case.) The non-SAS backplane has what looks to be a fairly standard 68-pin cable connection to the controller, and a normal 8-pin power supply. The SAS data cable is different, but has the same 8-pin power connection.

BUT the bad news is that the two controller cards I got are PCI-X, and that's absolutely worthless to me.

I haven't used SCSI in many, many years. Last one I had was ... I think it was a 20 GB drive in a Mac SE.

So, what can I do with these drives? It wouldn't offend my sensibilities to have a 6-drive RAID 0 ... (although it might offend PG&E a little bit.)

[Merc1138]

See if you can build yourself a NAS or SAN cheap?

[ldivinag]

useless. completely usesless.

please send them to me for immediate disposal...

[ibanezfoo]

Better have a decent power supply for all that... Build a RAID 5 and put all your pr0n on it. You can do whatever you would normally do with any pile of hard drives... 15k's are fairly fast but they are old, and noisy.... I'd probably just pry out all the rare earth magnets and scrap the rest. Back in the day we'd harvest the platters and give them to one of the guys who was a martial arts teacher. He used them for shuriken practice.

I am surprised though that they let you take them.... we have to get all of our HDs ground up and get a certification receipt.

[Peter.Steele]

Better have a decent power supply for all that... Build a RAID 5 and put all your pr0n on it. You can do whatever you would normally do with any pile of hard drives... 15k's are fairly fast but they are old, and noisy.... I'd probably just pry out all the rare earth magnets and scrap the rest. Back in the day we'd harvest the platters and give them to one of the guys who was a martial arts teacher. He used them for shuriken practice.

I am surprised though that they let you take them.... we have to get all of our HDs ground up and get a certification receipt.

I've got a 1kW Corsair PSU, and my case is HUGE. It's a first-gen CoolerMaster CMStacker, with 12 half-height drive bays and a slot for a second PSU. I've even got a BFG 750W PSU laying around, BNIB, that could fit in there ...

Also, as far as noise goes, you haven't HEARD noise until you've heard Crossfire'd 4870's. I can't imagine that these drives would even be audible over that.

[zenmastar]

Not worth building anything around it as the costs for SCSI will be high. Best bet is to auction off the Proliant drives on ebay or put on craigslist.

[Nose Nuggets]

why would you do a 6 drive raid 0? then your probability of complete data loss is 6 times higher.

the only thing i would do with it is a 3-5 drive raid 5 and keep the others as spares. they are probably $300 a pop if you need a replacement down the road.

[Mute]

Six drives? Raid 1+0.

[dotalchemy]

why would you do a 6 drive raid 0? then your probability of complete data loss is 6 times higher.

Because it would be ultra fast.

Stupid, yes, but fast. There are valid uses for RAID 0.

I'd personally forget about them. Just give them to me.

[Merc1138]

why would you do a 6 drive raid 0? then your probability of complete data loss is 6 times higher.

the only thing i would do with it is a 3-5 drive raid 5 and keep the others as spares. they are probably $300 a pop if you need a replacement down the road.

Because if you already have a backup elsewhere then it doesn't matter.

[high_revs]

well. re: raid 0 or raid 5... is Peete Steele going to be replacing the drives when 1 goes bad to maintain raid 5? i mean... drives are old.. expensive... and small amounts. so it doesn't sense to have raid 5 if OP is not going to be replacing drives. just maintain a image of the install and if one goes bad, reinstall the image back from 4 to 3 drives for example.

[sholling]

They really aren't worth dealing with. Not only are they small and noisy but they'll turn your computer into very effective a space heater and drive up your electric bill. Do yourself a favor and just get a fast SSD (SATA3 with a SATA3 controller) for your boot/application drive and then just go with a couple of great big green drives in RAID1 for your data.

[Nose Nuggets]

Because if you already have a backup elsewhere then it doesn't matter.

the couple of hours it takes to reinstall an OS and software DOES matter.

[lazyworm]

I have 2 8-slot scsi 2U chassis at home if you want to buy them off me.
PM if you're interested and I can look up the configs and/or send pics this evening.

[Merc1138]

the couple of hours it takes to reinstall an OS and software DOES matter.

Again, you would only do that if you had a backup. Start restoring the back up, go eat dinner and come back an hour later. Plus with my initial suggestion(and other people's as well) of using them in a NAS/SAN, your OS wouldn't be installed on them anyway(unless you were booting over the network via iscsi or something).