SCSI enclosure on the cheap?

September 11, 2008 10:30 AM

Looking for a DYI SCSI enclosure on the cheap. Any ideas?

So my boss bestowed on me 5 beautiful 15K SCSI drives and a card. I can put the card in my current PC and run an external cable to the drives in another tower. Basically, I'm looking for a case with 5 3.5" slots and room for a standard power supply (I'm guessing my 550W Antec can't handle my OCd C2D, 7900GT, and a few other devices on TOP of the 5 new SCSI drives).

A follow up question: He gave me these because I'm running into a bottleneck with handling a lot of 20MB RAW files from my A700 on my current rig. Is this complete overkill? I've heard the 7200.11 Seagates are near as fast as Raptors now.

ONE more follow up question: If I'm not worried about data redundancy (I have an external that backs up important files every night), what is the best way to implement these drives in Windows XP?

posted by lattiboy to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Striping is the fastest raid set if you don't care about redundancy and want to use all the drives as a single logical volume.

Without knowing more about what you're doing I would say its a bit over kill. You're going to find that those drives are annoyingly loud and eat a lot of power. You can find enclosures all over google for between $50-150 and then you'll need the cable if you don't already have one. You may want to think about investing in a SSD or just a newer faster SATA drive to deal with your bottleneck.
posted by wavering at 10:41 AM on September 11, 2008

A standard (ATX) power supply doesn't like to turn on without a motherboard to supply the power-on signal, so if you DIY this you may need to wire up the case's power button to the appropriate pin on the PSU to turn it on. This isn't a "supported" configuration for most power supplies, though, so be careful of any weird issues it could cause. This is probably voodoo, but I would plug both your current computer and the new one into the same circuit to minimize any problems with different grounding.

Re the last question - you want RAID 0 for the fastest possible setup without redundancy. Keep in mind that RAID 0 (striping) will make you 5 times *less* reliable than a single drive, though, since if any one of the 5 fails, the whole array is toast, and potentially a whole day's work is gone. It would be very, very fast, though, and you would get the combined space of all five drives (well, five times the smallest drive.) If you aren't dealing with that much data, you could do raid 10 (mirrored stripes) across four of the drives, with one as a spare - that would be not quite as fast as RAID 0, but you could survive a drive failure. RAID 10 would give you the combined storage space of two of the drives.

On preview: yup, they'll be really loud, hot, and power-hungry. I didn't even think of the SSD, but that's a great idea.
posted by pocams at 10:45 AM on September 11, 2008

Okay, thanks a lot for the helpful replies. I looked into an SSD, but the multi-tasking problems seem to persist in all brands/makes right now. Also, these were free (I'm guessing about $800 worth of stuff?), and I feel kind of obligated to give it the old college try. Additionally, he's the VP of IT, so actually my bosses, bosses, boss. Returns not accepted.

Thanks for pointing out the obvious with the PSU. This is going to be a huge PITA isn't it?
posted by lattiboy at 10:50 AM on September 11, 2008

Free stuff will cost you in the end. And equipment running in your datacenter is always 10 times louder running in your home.

If you're talking about working with RAW files in photoshop or lightroom could set your new fast drive to be the scratch disk and just be sure not to use that volume for anything else. That limits your drive to just dealing with the tasks PS/lightroom throws at it.
posted by wavering at 10:57 AM on September 11, 2008

If this is really for work then just expense a real SCSI enclosure to make use of the equipment. No sense in trying to jury-rig 75% of the solution into the entire solution. One of these enclosures is only $350 which is pretty cheap given that you already have all the really expensive stuff.
posted by GuyZero at 11:44 AM on September 11, 2008

That site also has a $99 2-drive enclosure that includes a PSU for the drives. Hard to get much cheaper than that.
posted by GuyZero at 11:44 AM on September 11, 2008

Why don't you get a larger case and put the drives inside your system? 550W sounds like plenty

You may also need a new motherboard if the SCSI adapter is PCI-X and you want to take full advantage of the speed.
posted by wongcorgi at 11:58 AM on September 11, 2008