external scsi enclosures help

gibbonsl

I want to try to setup one

first things first this will be setup over a couple of months so bear with me.

what type of SCSI should go with and is their a way for me to do this using my laptops

or am I going to need a desktop?

thread Hi-Jack welcome

Qeldroma

Gibbs,

Do you kind of know what you want capacity-wise? Are you on a budget?

I also have a question about how long of a cable you can run with SCSI- is that important to you too?

gibbonsl

size wise is watever kind want to go over 500 gigs 1 terybyte is possable.

right now want to make a file server.

price wise under 1000 if at all possable

this is kinda a passtime for me right now.

and I want to get more hands on with SCSI.

reading has not been to helpful.

cable length anything possable.

if any has better ideas please chime in.

can I do this with my laptops, or am I going to need a desktop to start off?

Tex

Big scsi drives are pricey. scsi is fast and you can get very fast last generation drives cheap but they are small. A 18gb atlas 15k that does 3ms and over 74,000 on ATTO is $40 used. A new state of the art drive hits close to 100,000 on atto.

If you need big storage where speed isnt the main criteria its way cheaper to go ide.

All my servers here have 3 to 10 scsi drives but also have multiple huge ide drives for casual storage and backups. You can use a raid or non-raid controller with an external enclosure.

use scsi where speed is the most important attribute not cost or size.

You will kill any speed advantage trying to use a extenal scsi enclosure with a laptop.

With a good sheilded lvd external cable you can go a pretty long ways. Unless your trying to go to the next room or something external cable length with lvd scsi isnt going to be a problem. I don't have a spec sheet in front of me but its probably > 30' anyway. Long enough to put it in your closet to keep the sound down....

Remember the beauty of scsi is that its basicaly a bus in and of itself. IDE/SATA issues a read or write to a drive and has to sit and wait for it to complete before doing the next one. With scsi it can issue reads or writes to multiple drives and catch them as them come back. So the beauty of scsi isnt how fast one drive is but rather trying to balance the I-O across multiple drives. You want OS on one, APPS on another, pagefile on another etc.. You want the heads to stay locked as it reads and writes to all the drives.

You want to be loading a app from one drive, paging to another and have temp files on a 3'rd etc... You do not need raid. You just need to balance the I-O across multiple drives the best you can.

THATS where you feel the differance in scsi.

let me know if you want more help on setting something up.

Tex

gibbonsl

so I need to get a desktop to get the best performance out of it

hm that will have to wait to after the 1st of the year:(

and I love my set up now

do you think I should wait on seting up the SCSI system untill I have most of the desktop set up

want to make it a total SCSI system except for some very large IDE back up drives

and what are your thoughts on onboard SCSI vers an controler card PCI or PCI-e card

I always spend alot of time on making my decisions on what motherboard to buy

Tex

If I were you and had a budget of sorts but wanted a fast desktop setup...

Get a 21320 LSI controller and two or three maxtor 15k drives off ebay. Size depnds on your budget. I love the little 18gb suckers. Then keep one or two huge ide drives for MP3's, movies etc...

You want your OS, apps, user files, pagefile etc... on the scsi's and thats all. With a decent case you don't need a external enclosure for two or three drives.

Tex