Looking for a place to get small(-ish) SCSI drives

From: der Mouse <mouse_at_Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
Date: Sun Dec 5 03:43:38 2004

> I fool around with a lot of systems that want small (by today's
> standards) 50-pin SCSI drives. A few years ago you couldn't walk
> around the streets of Palo Alto without tripping over big stacks of
> 500MB drives. These days, though, the stacks are made out of 9GB SCA
> drives --

Well, I have a number of small 50-pin SCSI drives. While I have
comparatively few SCA machines, I'd cheerfully swap my small drives for
large 50-pin drives, or SCA drives with SCA-to-50+4+6-pin adapters (ie,
adapters that break out SCA to 50pin SCSI, 4pin power, and three
jumpers for SCSI ID). I have few to no machines that simply won't work
with larger drives; even the ones that don't handle large drives right
will use the beginning of a large drive as if it were a small drive.

About the smallest drive I use these days is about 1G (I have a
relatively large number of drives that are 1010M). But I haven't
thrown out the older stuff.

What sort of physical size limits? Some of my oldest drives are
full-height 5?" drives....

> [D]rives smaller than that are suddenly "rare" and "expensive", $30
> or $40 for any SCSI drive under 9GB at a lot of resellers I've
> visited lately.

$30-$40 is unfortunately what shipping is likely to run to carry out
the swap I refer to above. Unless of course you're going to be coming
by Montreal for some other reason and can piggyback such a swap onto
such a visit, I suppose.

> Anyone know where those stacks went? Are small drives just
> impossible to come by for less than $30 now?

Probably. :-(

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Received on Sun Dec 05 2004 - 03:43:38 GMT