-=> 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...

Did to me too. and a lot of friends were jealous.
 
 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?

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

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

 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...   :-) 

Servers with more than one motherboard are a bit unusual. I do know the
kind of case you are talking about though. But that's what they did
calls this.

 LE> I plan on setting it up like this:
 
 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even less than current ones go for a fair bit.

 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. 
 

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

 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. 

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

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

 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. 

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

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

 RJT> Eh?  What are you talking about here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 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). 

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

 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. 

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

 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. 

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

 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. 

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

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


--- FMailX 1.60