SCSI or IDE?

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bobbylx

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 20, 2007
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Well I have a question for you all. I am thinking about my home server, Machine #2 in my signature. It's a proliant series, with 8 x 73gb scsi drives. 2 of the drives are in their own enclosure just above the DVD Rom drive, and these 2 drives are mirrored for my OS, server 2003. The other 6 drives are in a lower enclosure and at the moment I have it spanned so the OS treats it as one large drive. (I know, not very smart, but nothing on this is mission critical, just movies and music) Anyway, 6 x 73gb drives really isn't that much, especially since I copy all of my DVD's in a dvd format.

Here's my other option. At work we have a lot of inventory turnover and things come and go. We received a bunch of servers a while back and had them in storage for a few months. My manager finally told me to strip them of their good parts and we'll dispose of the rest. So, in one of the servers, a StorageTek, I found brand new blades that had 5 x 250gb Maxtor DiamondMax IDE hard drives. We used many of the drives in other machines here at work, but I still have 10 or so.

At home on a shelf I also have a PCI IDE RAID card that supports 4 IDE drives.

So, my question is, do you think it is better to go with the more reliable SCSI and lower space, or add the RAID card and toss 4 x 250gb drives in it for 1tb of space?
Oh, and buying larger scsi drives is not an option any time soon.

Also, I've thought about putting the IDE drives and card in the server as it sits right now, there' just no room to place the IDE's.
 
Personally, I wouldn't waste my time or money with PATA. It's a dead technology. If you aren't happy with the size of your SCSI drives why not go with SATA drives in a RAID 5? Granted you don't have the controller. I just feel that spending money on PATA is a waste.

JMO
 
Since you have the hardware, go ahead and use it. While I am not a huge fan of Maxtor the fact that means these came out of servers means they are probably their Max3 Enterprise drives.

What's happening with the storagetek that you are pulling the drives?
 
I don't know what happened to the storagetek. We had some company come in and haul it off. They got quite a bit, the storagetek server also had a tape library with it, and a few other workstations and odd and ends. I managed to yank out some of the server hardware and drives before the people came and got it, but that's all that's left.

As far as reliability, how is IDE compared to SCSI? I've used IDE in desktops, but not in servers. And if these are as you said the Max3 enterprise, does that make them a bit better than your regular desktop IDE?

Really, I'm just trying to get the most storage I can, and somewhat reliable, with the free crap I have laying around. And after pricing larger size SCSI drives, I don't see that happening.
 
Unload everything on craigs list, build yourself an efficient, small server utelizing a 1tb drive.

Cheaper, better, and more future proof. Also, much much more storage.
 
Actually, I'm thinking of something similar. An idea that just occurred to me. Temporarily move all my data to IDE, sell the SCSI drives, SCSI enclosure, SCSI controller, and purchase a SATA enclosure, Controller and a few large SATA drives? Hmm...there's an option.
 
Alright, I need to learn to read. Since you already have the hardware then I'd use it since it's free. Like Lazn_Work said, they are sure to be enterprise drives so I wouldn't worry too much about them.
 
I have had IDE drives that are over 10 years old and still working just fine, and SCSI drives that died within 6 months.. But that means nothing really, as the reverse is also true.

I'd move the data to IDE and sell the SCSI.. even servers are going away from it. (unless you count SAS as SCSI, though it really is a SATA/SCSI hybrid in my book)
 
Ockie said:
Unload everything on craigs list, build yourself an efficient, small server utelizing a 1tb drive.

Cheaper, better, and more future proof. Also, much much more storage.
Click to expand...

What...the...HELLL!? The resident king of overdone storage arrays is recommending someone purposely go to a single drive implementation over a hardware RAID array? :eek:

I think I need to sit down and figure out how to cancel my account here. The end of existence is upon us all.
 
sabregen said:
What...the...HELLL!? The resident king of overdone storage arrays is recommending someone purposely go to a single drive implementation over a hardware RAID array? :eek:

I think I need to sit down and figure out how to cancel my account here. The end of existence is upon us all.
Click to expand...

Hey now, his storage array is already made of TB drives.. If there was a single 20TB drive I am sure he'd be using it.
 
You did see that 1.5TB drives came out yesterday, right? I honestly don't know WTF Ockie is waiting for these days. :)

OP - if you're interested in selling the SCSI drives, I might possibly have a use for them (if my FC disks don't come through).
 
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