Big PC boxes (was: SCSI Bus Problem?

From: Russ Blakeman <rhb57_at_vol.com>
Date: Mon Feb 11 19:31:50 2002

It does get to the point that it gets REAL expensive, REAL hot and REAL
noisy though. My Netserver LX Pro presently has 12 hotswap bays with 6
filled with 9.1 gb drives, 3 more on the way and keeping an eye peeled for 3
more. It also has 2 4.3 gb drives in the 2 right side fixed bays in 5.25" to
3.5" HDD trays for the OS to reside on (Raid 0 on those but tape backup
daily). The drives are quiet as can be, ST19171WC's but the heat and noise
of 4x Pentium Pros, 3 power supplies, bunches of fans and all those drives
in a small server room made a need for a door to quiet it down and a vent
fan to the outside of the room (keeps the rest of the basement shop comfy
too without the furnace kicking in). I was going to insulate the room for
noise but heat was a bigger issue and I want to let it out, not hold it in.

My older IBM PC Server 320 is coming apart soon as I xfer the old data and
all my old 5.25" 50 and 68 pin drives go up on ebay, as does the tower and
cdroms. I'm keeping my Microtest 14 cdrom tower but since it doesn't work
under Windows 2000 server I'm diabling the SCSI to 10baseT card and putting
the flat ribbons onto 2 external connectors (1 per 7 drives of course) and
cabling them direct to an Adaptec PCI F/W adapter. I was going to use my
older EISA adapter but the speed just wasn't there for the 12x cdrom
drives - plus I can swap one of the 12x drives to a CDRW drive if I need,
something that didn't work on the SCSI-to-10baseT card under NT4 server.



=> -----Original Message-----
=> When you get up to a dozen or so drive bays, does it start
=> becoming a REAL
=> computer?
Received on Mon Feb 11 2002 - 19:31:50 GMT