The Price of Life... well, of hard disk drives...

[Spinal]

I have not lost my mind, I have it backed up on disk somewhere...

Or so I hoped to do...

I just grabbed an old compaq server off eBay (2 processors, I can fit 4 - pentium xeons, 700mhz each - some ludicrous amount of ram at max (I've been offered a 16Gb ram card for it... its 16 1gb pc133 ram slots sitting on their own expansion card!) but it comes a little lacking in the disk drive sector. Especially as I planned to make a storage server out of it and shlunk it on the network.

Last timeI did this, I took a mobo with 2 processors, added some pci RAID controller cards and some IDE HD's and it was done. This time, I wanted the geek factor and got a "proper" server; problem is it wants SCSI hard-drives. No problem I though, then I saw the price of SCSI HD's.

Can someone explain WHY SCSI HD's are so much more expensive than IDE/SATA ones? eBuyer does things like 250gB for less than £50; while the cheapest SCSI I've found at that size sends me in the 300/400 range!

Also, while were at it, do IDE->SCSI converters exist? Doubt it, but hey, might ask eBay doesn't seem to have eny...

Grumble Grumble... <goes off to see how much more time it will take to create a near-infinite storage solution now that I need to use SCSI>

Michele

 

[grober]

simple explanation

As far as I'm aware SCSI DRIVES were faster than the old EIDE drives -they rotated faster and had their own controller on board. They have largely been overtaken by the faster cheaper SATA drives now. SCSI may still be faster for intensive motherboard operations I think, but I'm sure the forum computer experts will explain in more detail. To convert a SATA DRIVE to SCSI you need to add a controller onto the drive. Something along these lines-- http://www.addonics.com/products/io/adsalvd160.asp

but a word of warning there are many versions/ cabling of the SCSI interface so be sure you know which one you are dealing with. If you add on the price of a converter to the SATA drive I not sure if the additional complexity is worth the saving?? No doubt the experts will know.

 

[LastMinute]

2 processors, I can fit 4

I doubt multiple processors will benefit a disk server. The machine will spend its time I/O-bound (disk and network), not CPU-bound.

some ludicrous amount of ram at max

What are you intending to run on it? Standard 32-bit operating systems and applications can't use more than 4 GB.

Can someone explain WHY SCSI HD's are so much more expensive than IDE/SATA ones?

As grober said, speed - usually somewhat better latency, seek time and transfer rates with SCSI. Also, I read SCSI disks are typically much more reliable (physically) than IDE - with an order of magnitude longer MTBF, for instance, and designed to be left running continuously. Another reason disk servers favour SCSI over ATA is that you can fit more devices per controller.

do IDE->SCSI converters exist?

Don't think so.

 

[miro]

Don't think so.

SCSI to IDE converters do exist. Promist make a backbone that is IDE which terminates into a SCSI port.

Servers are not just machines running NTServer OS. They are in fact the AMG machines of the PC world with a high level of specific equipment and serious uptime capability.

Most of my servers ran for 5 years non-stop until they were replaced with bigger ones.

 

[SimonsMerc]

SCSI disks traditionally were better made than IDE ones. This is no longer true, but because consumers have gotten used to paying more for them, manufacturers still charge more. Buy an SATA card and stick it in - you really don't need to pay a fortune for SCSI disks for a home server

-simon

 

[GrahamC230K]

Should have gone NAS. Much easier and cheaper.

 

[Spinal]

NAS was an option, but I was hoping to get it done cheaper this way...
-old server, 30 quid.
-300gb ide hard-drives, 50 each, 1TB @ roughly 150 pounds;
-linux server (freeNAS?) free...

look on my face when i saw the price of 300gb scsi hard disks? priceless

Where's my mastercard now... oh well, bought a second one (hey, at 35 pounds each, with 100 odd gb of hd;s in them, its cheaper than buying hds ) from which I can leech the hard-drives and use the box as a firewall... (or something... im sure I can fit something usefull on 9gb, even if only a machine to learn on)

Oh well, I better go grumbling about the cost of scsi drives somewhere else

 

[whizzkid11]

Guess a normal Desktop pc, with a Firewire 800 card + 3 external Lacies would have been very fast - quicker than any IDE drives, SCSI drives etc...

I have 3 x 1TB LACIE Big Extremes on a FW800 interface card and they run quicker than my internal drives.

Just ordered a the 1TB Western Dig MY BOOK drives - so will see how they compar with the Lacies...

The beauty of this is you can plug them on any pc with a FW800 card or even your laptop using FW400 or USB2, without getting you hands dirty...

 

[Spinal]

whizz, problem with a firewire card on a "normal" desktop pc is that it is limited by the PCI bus bandwidth (assumign a PCI firewire card). This is the same issue with IDE/SCSI raid controllers that slot into PCI.

I'm one of those weird people that believe firewire is Mac technology and does great on a mac where it has a bus of its own, but as an expansion I don't like it.

External standalone drives were never really an option for paranoid me; I want data redundancy! I have no idea what iTunes's policy for lost songs is, nor how much time re-transferring all my cd's back to ogg would take... but I do know I would prefer not to find out

Today my server arrived (well, the first). I had asked to have it left at the depot, where I collected it. As soon as I showed them the tracking number, the guy turns around to his colleagues and says "this guy is here for the heavy thing"... to which everyone in the office nodded. They were very kind and open till 8pm (cityLink, love them!); he even gave me a hand shuffling the monsters seats around to fit a pallet into the car.

Now, the server sits on its pallet in the center of my living room, simply because I don't have the manpower to lift it upstairs I guess tomorrow I'll need to "invite" some friends over! I had a quick look through the server, I'm in love! 4 redundant fans! 3 redundant power supplies! hot-swap just about everything! (in case you didn't realise, this is my first "real" server at home; before this I have 2U/4U rackmount boxes with an ATX motherboard and an ide hd inside).

I'm contemplating Windows 2003 server for it, along with ISA on the second box; but I saw something about Windows Network Data edition (or something, can't remember to be frank!) Will need to look into that.

On a side note, the case came with "half" the rails; (as in, there is a rail screwed onto the case, but it doesn't have the half that screws into the rack). Does anyone know if there is a way I can get only the other half; or do I need to buy a set of rails? (which would be ironic as I think they would cost me more than the server itself )

I'll post some pics when I finally get it into the rack (thanks Spike!)

Michele

 

[fuzzer]

External standalone drives were never really an option for paranoid me; I want data redundancy! I have no idea what iTunes's policy for lost songs is, nor how much time re-transferring all my cd's back to ogg would take... but I do know I would prefer not to find out

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/01/17/review_lacie_ethernet_disk_raid/