What to do with old SCSI disks

C

colinstu

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Oct 11, 2007
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A friend was clearing out a bunch of old computer gear and I inheirited most of it for now.

Going through it all, I was able to rummage out a total of 14 SCSI 3.5" drives.

9 of them are IBM branded, come in a small sled, and have a SCA connector right on the drive. 1 drive was a bare Seagate also with a SCA connector, and finally there were 4 Compaq branded drives in compaq sleds (the sleds have an SCA connector, but looking inside I see the drives have a smaller SCSI plug on them and separate power).

These are mostly 9GB drives so not worth much of a shit, but they still look fun as hell to mess around with.

The compaq drives are inside an old compaq tower server (with scsi backplane) and it's able to see these 4 drives (although it reports one of them as bad).

Other then that, there was no IBM backplane for the rest of these drives. No scsi ribbon cables either. Any idea what on earth to do with this stuff besides toss it or take the magnets out?

In the mix I also got two PCI scsi cards. One has an Intel i960 chip as well as EDO ram installed, while the other card is a little more simpler looking.
 
obviously you need to raid0 all of them together and make yourself a streaming server capable of holding over two blu-rays
 
Parabellum said:
Ebay..
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Seconded. You'd be amazed how often corporate types trawl ebay trying to pick up spares or replacements for their aging disk arrays. I had some old VAX based servers with disks intact and flogged them on ebay for several thousand (I was going to can them). Turns out 20 year old hardware is still in production in places because it's cheaper to buy crap from ebay to repair them than to re-write and modernize the software!
 
Other then that, there was no IBM backplane for the rest of these drives. No scsi ribbon cables either. Any idea what on earth to do with this stuff besides toss it or take the magnets out?
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Well, if they are 9GB, they are most likely Fast Wide, Ultra Or Ultra Wide. You can probably find a chassis with SCA backplane on ebay. For example, if yours are ultra wide you can get a 14 slot chassis with Controller installed for about $30 and up plus shipping.

http://www.trademoon.com/Product59839.aspx

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Compaq-Stor...122?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5d26bf6982

If you just have Fast or Fast Wide, there are other models which you can use, for similar pricing. A cool toy with LFL (lotsa flashing lights). Will also sound like a plane taking off and is likely also useful as a small space heater with the drives installed.
 
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