-=> Quoting Roy J. Tellason to Matt Mc_Carthy <=-

 RJT> I'm tempted.    Have these reached any sort of
"affordable"
 RJT> pricing?  I haven't looked,  lately... 

I got a deal on a local forsale newsgroup. a 200g WD HD *and* an
ULTRA ATA controller, new, in the box, for only $200. 

It's going into a system running an older version of Windows (probably
Win98, and a *lot* of removable drive racks and other gear. It'll serve
as storage for making backups of HDs using Drive Copy. 

The box is going to be built in a sewrver case I goty a deal on. Tower
case with *six* externally accessible 5.25" slots, two externally
acessible 3.5 slots, and another internal 3.5" slot. 

I plan on setting it up like this:

slot 1 (5.25) combined 3.5"/5.25" floppy drive.
slot 2 (5.25) IDE removable rack (primary master)
Slot 3 (5.25) SCSI removable rack (50 pin)
Slot 4 (5.25) SCSI removable rack (68 pin)
Slot 5 (5.25) IDE removable rack (secondary  master)
Slot 6 (5.25) SCSI CD-RW
Slot 7 (3.5) ZIP drive
Slot 8 (3.5) Jaz drive

And the 200 gig drive will be in the internal slot on it's own
controller. Though if that's not bootable when no other HDs are in the
system, I may make it the secondary slave. 

And then there'll be some external SCSI stuff, as well as a 6-in-1 USB
card reader.

We had a setup like this (but with fewer slots) t work, and it made
upgrading OS or hardware a breeze. We'd make a copy of the HD of the
system to be upgraded *before* doing anything else. Then, if there was
a problem, we could return things to the way we were when we started.

Also, we could use old drives (640 meg to a few gig) in removable
cartridges for the racks to let us boot it with different OSes to test
things out.

Very, *very* handy. 

 RJT> Last several times I looked,  $100 would get you 40,  then 60,  then
 RJT> 80G in real short order,  and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see
 RJT> 120G or higher in that price range by now,  as it's been several
 RJT> months since I looked at what was out there. 

Well, I paid $300 for a new 40 meg drive once upon a toime. and more
recently, I paid that for a 40 *gig* drive. Now I paid less than that
for a 200 gig drive.


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