Leonard Erickson wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 -=> Quoting Roy J. Tellason to Leonard Erickson <=-

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

 RJT> A dollar a gig sounds pretty good to me...

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

 RJT> Windoze won't have a problem with that?

 LE> Well, to run things like Drive copy, you actually boot to *DOS* (or
 LE> something stranger) and do the copying from there. Drive Copy
 LE> allows saving a drive as a file, with varying degrees of 
 LE> compression.

Yeah,  depending on how much stuff is already compressed...  So it
essentially runs its own OS,  huh?  And whatever it is doesn't have a
problem with large drives.  Interesting.

 LE> You may be able to run DriveCopy (or similar programs) from 
 LE> Windows, but for what I'm doing, it's best to run from DOS and boot
 LE> off a floppy, so that Windows can't mess with the drive you are 
 LE> copying.

Makes sense.  That's one of the things that makes backups difficult.  You
try and back up a system that's actively running a multitasking OS and it
can get real complicated,  in short order.

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

 RJT> That's not a server case.  My linux box is 5 externally accessible
 RJT> 5.25" slots,  one internal,  3 internal 3.5" slots.  I
also have this
 RJT> other case here with six 5.25 external,  and 3 3.5",  two accessible. 
 RJT> To me,  a server case is typically double the width of a standard
 RJT> case,  has a power supply on each side,  and mounts more than one MB, 
 RJT> not to mention having *lots* of drive bays...   :-) 

 LE> Servers with more than one motherboard are a bit unusual. I do 
 LE> know the kind of case you are talking about though.

I've seen them,  but not any time lately.  Dunno what's out there these
days.  Probably rack mount stuff...

 LE> But that's what they did calls this.

 LE> I plan on setting it up like this:
 LE>  
 LE> slot 1 (5.25) combined 3.5"/5.25" floppy drive.
 LE> slot 2 (5.25) IDE removable rack (primary master)
 LE> Slot 3 (5.25) SCSI removable rack (50 pin)
 LE> Slot 4 (5.25) SCSI removable rack (68 pin)
 LE> Slot 5 (5.25) IDE removable rack (secondary master)
 LE> Slot 6 (5.25) SCSI CD-RW
 LE> Slot 7 (3.5) ZIP drive
 LE> Slot 8 (3.5) Jaz drive

 RJT> I haven't gotten into any of that removable stuff,  not at all. 
 RJT> Haven't even seen what the hardware for it looks like.

 LE> These are fairly simple. Do be warned to check things out 
 LE> carefully as there are several brands and the "rack" and 
 LE> "cartridge" portions are *not* interchangeable between brands. 
 LE> Worse yet, there's at least one brand where their "cartridges" 
 LE> will plug into the racks I use, but the connector poinout is 
 LE> different. Ouch!

Yeah.

 LE> But basically, you've got the "rack" or "bay"
which goes into a 
 LE> 5.25" drive slot. It's got a power connector, an IDE or SCSI 
 LE> connector, and for SCSI, drive ID jumpers. And sometimes, a tiny
 LE> fan.

They do the drive ID in there?  How odd.

 LE> They also have a lock & key so you can lock drives in place. Some
 LE> have the power connected to the key so a drive won't get power
 LE> unless it's locked in. And there's power LED and an "access" LED
 LE> (for the bus, not the individual drive). There's also 7 segement
 LE> display on some of the deluxe SCSI units that display's the drive
 LE> ID (0-F).

I've often thought that they oughta have more lights on stuff.  I know that
with some drives you have a little two-pin LED connector on the front of
it,  and with this system before I lost the one SCSI drive I had the red
"HDD" led for the IDE drives,  and the yellow "turbo"
LED plugged into the SCSI card.  It was interesting to watch,  sometimes.

 LE> The cartridges will take a 3.5" drives as long as it's the 
 LE> "standard" height not the older "1/2 height".
They'll take laptop
 LE> drives too, if you have an adapter.

Hm.

 LE> The cartridge have a handle that hinges near the top if the
 LE> faceplate and is sheped so tthat lifting it helps lever the drive
 LE> out of the rack. the back has a connector (Centronics like on the
 LE> ones I have) that plugs into a matching connector in the rack. The
 LE> top of the cartridhe will slide off. Inside are short cables for
 LE> attaching to the drive.

Centronics-type sounds like a good choice,  those are pretty reliable
connectors compared to some of what else has become standard out there.

 LE> On IDE you've got power & IDE cables. On SCSI you've got power, 
 LE> SCSI and some stuff to *try* attaching to the drive ID jumper pins
 LE> on the drive.

Heh.

 LE> Even if the racks support hot swap, most OSes don't. So you power
 LE> done the system swap a drive in or out, and power back up.

I'm not certain,  but I *think* that you can do it under linux for a RAID 5
array.  My recollection is that it's okay with the OS (or the driver maybe)
if it's okay with the hardware.  But then maybe you've gotta do something
to tell the system you've put another drive in there.

 LE> Oh yeah, the front of the crartridge can be "broken" out by 
 LE> breaking a few tabs, allowing you to put in things like Zip drives,
 LE> Jaz drives and various tape drives. I've got Jaz drives and a 4 gig
 LE> tape drive in SCSI cartridges. I'm not sure if I want to put the 24
 LE> gig DAT drive into a crartridge or mount in in an external drive
 LE> case.

I've got one Archive tape drive that seems to take a proprietary interface
card,  uses a 50-wire ribbon cable and since it's an 8-bit ISA card it
doesn't give you a whole lot of choices about IRQ and DMA settings,  which
it needs one each of.  I also have a couple of "floppy tape"
drives,  a Colorado 350 and another one,  I think perhaps a Conner or
something,  plus a SCSI drive that seems similar to the other one that
takes "big" tapes.  I messed around with that first one long
enough under linux to be convinced that I'd gotten it to work,  that I
could tar a file to it and get it back again,  and that's the extent of it.
 There's a whole mess of tapes in a box here,  but the most I can store on
one of them is about 256M,  so I can't get too excited about using these. 
I have *one* tape in that sort of package (DC-600,  etc. style) that claims
to store 1.2G,  and my brother has a pile more of those,  but I haven't got
a drive that supports it.  (Yet?)

 RJT> SCSI sounds good,  though.  I have heard about some deals here 
 RJT> and there for less-than-current SCSI drives and am thinking about 
 RJT> giving that a shot to build a RAID array,  for a bit more 
 RJT> reliabiity.  Got the host adapters in ISA, VLB, and PCI,  but no 
 RJT> drives at this point...

 LE> Well, *large* SCSI drives are expen$$$ive.

Yeah.  They're always more pricey than IDE,  but the performance overall is
better,  I'd think.

 LE> Even less than current ones go for a fair bit.

I know that this one deal my brother mentioned was seriously cheap,  but
that was because they had some oddball connector,  and we'd need to get
adapters for each drive.  I can't recall the specifics,  but maybe they
were designed for hot swap or something.  Last time I looked what was out
there wasn't that cheap,  but I haven't looked lately,  and probably
should.

 RJT> I suspect that I'm going to have to get myself some of those adapters
 RJT> that let you mount a 3.5" drive in a 5.25" bay.  I also
suspect that
 RJT> I'm going to want to add a nontrivial number of fans to that box. 
 

 LE> Well, for not *that* much more, you can get a rack & cartridge 
 LE> combo. The IDE ones are $215-50, depending on where you buy them.
 LE> 50 pin SCSI runs about double. Not sure what 68 pin SCSI runs as
 LE> the only one I have I was given.

That's getting up there,  particularly considering the drives being so
cheap these days and all.  The major benefit there being that stuff is
removable,  and I don't see a need for that just yet.  It *would* be a nice
way to back up,  by comparison with other media,  and you could yank it out
in a hurry if you had to for some reason,  but that's about the extent of
it.  Maybe I'll take a look at such stuff if I get the chance.

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

 RJT> Why slave and not master?  Seems to me that the electronics on that
 RJT> oughta be faster than much else of what's out there. 

 LE> Not master because I want the option of sticking another drive in
 LE> 'front" of it on the controller as a boot drive.

Ok.

 LE> And you *can* boot off a slave drive. One of my Windows boxes has
 LE> the boot drive as slave and a rack as the master. So I can boot a
 LE> different OS.

Hm.

 LE> And then there'll be some external SCSI stuff,

 RJT> Got a couple of external cdrom drives here,  but unfortunately I can't
 RJT> daisy-chain them as they each only have a single connector on the back
 RJT> of them rather than the more common twin connectors,  and I haven't
 RJT> yet found an adapter that'll let me do that. 

 LE> You can buy *cases* for multiple external SCSI devices. Basicly a
 LE> "minitower (or even full tower) case, but with no motherboard
 LE> related stuff, just drive bays, fans, a power supply and SCSI
 LE> cabling.

These are in their own cases already,  quite substantial ones at that. 
Almost as big as a compact desktop case.  I can see them sitting on the
shelf across the room,  in a stack that's got a PS/1 at the bottom of it, 
and that only sticks out about an inch on either side,  maybe a bit more. 
Not that much difference front-to-back,  either.

 LE> as well as a 6-in-1 USB card reader.

 RJT> Eh?  What are you talking about here?

 LE> It's an adapter that you plug Compact Flash, Microdrives, Smart
 LE> Media, etc cards into and they appear as drives. The one I have has
 LE> three slots, each takes two types of media that use the same
 LE> connector.

Oh,  ok.  Sounds nify.

 LE> For example, CF cars and microdrives use the same connector, but
 LE> microdrives are taller and a bit narrower.

 LE> I got it because a blind friend has a gizmo that's more or less
 LE> equivalent to an old "handheld PC" which uses Compact flash cards
 LE> for removable storage. 

 LE> I got the 6-in-1 because it wasn't that much more than the CF only
 LE> one. and since (at the time) I was planning on buying a digital
 LE> camera) I wanted more options. I wound up getting deal on a used
 LE> camera that uses CF cards, so I haven't needed the extra
 LE> felexibility yet.

I too am thinking about a camera,  but haven't even looked at what's out there yet.

 LE> I've also got an adapter that lets you use CF cards in a PCMCIA
 LE> slot. so I can use them on my laptop or my handhled (not that I
 LE> have the PCMCIA adapter for my handheld). 

 LE> I have a 128 meg card, a 64 meg and a whole bunch of 32 meg cards
 LE> (they were on sale). I could get a 256, 512 or evenn 1 gig card,
 LE> but I don't like the prices (1 gig CF card runs around $250-300)

That's the nice thing about a lot of this stuff,  if you don't like the
prices you can just wait a while...  :-)

 LE> I'm also going to order some *small* ones from an outfit that sells
 LE> IDE to CF adapters, along with a couple of adapters. Some of my
 LE> *old* gear that runs DOS will do quite well with a CF card 
 LE> replacing the HD. and it'll last longer and likely be faster than
 LE> old IDE drives.

Yeah,  I can see how that'd fly pretty good.

 RJT> I have been thinking about getting a USB card to plug into one or more
 RJT> of these boxes,  since so much stuff seems to be coming that way these
 RJT> days and I don't have it in any of the sytems here (yet). 

 LE> Well, USB 2.0 cards aren't too expensive and they are very fast.
 LE> But I notice that some of them don't support USB 2.0 under Win 98
 LE> or 95.

I'm not worried about that OS at this point.  There's support for USB in
linux if you're running a 2.4 kernel or later,  which is not a problem.

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

 RJT> I have made backups of a sort when upgrading,  under linux.  In the
 RJT> one case I pulled the whole (1G) drive that held the installation, 
 RJT> and copied a bunch of my configs to a backup on another drive,  which
 RJT> went okay mostly,  and in the other case I figured out what I needed
 RJT> to back up (mostly /etc) and copied that over to the backup drive. 
 RJT> Good thing I did,  too,  as there were a couple of bits missing from
 RJT> the new install. 

 LE> With Windows, backing up *everything* is the best bet.

Probably.

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

 RJT> I've never been that much into multi-boot setups,  except that this
 RJT> box has both dos and OS/2 on it (which I can't boot presently).  I
 RJT> guess I have enough machines here for what I need to do,  more or
 RJT> less. 

 LE> I haven't used multiboot much, but it's a useful option for "just
 LE> in case".

True.

 RJT> I paid that much for a *20M* drive once.  Still have it,  too,  and it
 RJT> still works,  with the machine I got it for -- running CP/M!  Only
 RJT> thing is,  the box won't boot off that drive,  you need a boot floppy
 RJT> to get it going.  I sure hope that WD-1000 controller card is still
 RJT> okay. 

 LE> Nowe you know why I want those IDE to CF adapters. I've got old 
 LE> ISA IDE controllers. Back up the old MFM drives, copy stuff to a CF
 LE> card, and install. If you want to be clever, stick the card and 
 LE> adapter behind a removeable drive faceplate, and you can pull the
 LE> card for upgrades without opening the box. :-)

 LE> I've got a bunch of old boxes that I'm salvaging stuff from and in
 LE> the process I'm pulling the MFM drives and collers. I wrap up the
 LE> drives and controllers together, and when I get around to it, I'll
 LE> plug them into an older box and copy everything on them to
 LE> something (probably a Zip disk). Then I can find some old bits of
 LE> software I want to save. And dispose of the drives and other
 LE> unneeded hardware.

Sounds like fun...

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