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

 -=> 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... 

 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.

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

 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.

Windoze won't have a problem with that?

 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.

That's not a server case.  My linux box is 5 externally accessible
5.25" slots,  one internal,  3 internal 3.5" slots.  I also have
this other case here with six 5.25 external,  and 3 3.5",  two
accessible.

To me,  a server case is typically double the width of a standard case, 
has a power supply on each side,  and mounts more than one MB,  not to
mention having *lots* of drive bays...   :-)

 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

I haven't gotten into any of that removable stuff,  not at all.  Haven't
even seen what the hardware for it looks like.  SCSI sounds good,  though. 
I have heard about some deals here and there for less-than-current SCSI
drives and am thinking about giving that a shot to build a RAID array,  for
a bit more reliabiity.  Got the host adapters in ISA, VLB, and PCI,  but no
drives at this point...

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


 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.

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

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

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

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

Eh?  What are you talking about here?

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

 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.

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

 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.

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

 LE> 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. 

 LE> Well, I paid $300 for a new 40 meg drive once upon a toime.

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

 LE> and more recently, I paid that for a 40 *gig* drive. Now I paid 
 LE> less than that for a 200 gig drive.

Heh.

Ain't technology wonderful?  :-)

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