Cheap fast storage idea

[brett.howard]

Hi All,

Just built a great fast scsi storage system for way cheap. Forget IDE and UDMA this is the way to go. Heres what I did.

Find an old compaq server with onboard UW SCSI (I used a proliant 1500 Pentium 133 that was destined to live in the trash!) and remove the 5 way hot plug drive cradle from it and throw the rest away. Buy a 4u rack panel (£6) cut a large rectangle in it and bolt the compaq drive cradle to it. Bolt on an AT power supply next to it (to power the drives!) stick it in a rack and conect it to an adaptec 2940UW or such like and take advantage of all the compaq 9Gb ultra scsi hot plug drives that are on eaby for like £40-£50 each.

With this system I can have 5 drives in at any one time but the drives are so cheap I can afford loads of them. The drives are real fast, especialy if you use multiple drives at the same time!!!

I have just started building another one for my video edit setup.

A real compaq 19" rack HD system is about £850 + VAT for a 7 way with no drives installed!

Mine cost me about £30 to put together

Hope this inspires somebody!

Cheers
Brett

[Vertige]

That's a cool idea. I found something else. Promise make a Ultra ata raid controller card ( able to do Level 0,1 and 5 ). You can use your existing IDE drive ( and/or purchase more ) and they claim you will get close to UW SCSI sustained data transfer rate ( with 66mhz PCI bus and Ultra ATA 100 drive ). Didn't try it out yet but i need something able to have a high sustained rate ( video capture ) whitout emptying my wallet, since i have already a couple of IDE drive, i taught that would be a great idea. I might try it out, anybody as an idea if PT LE would be happy with it...?web page

[brett.howard]

Hi Vertige,

A lot of people are using the promise ATA100 cards but not sure about the RAID card.
RAID is not realy much benifit for pro tools or video capture.

If you go for a promise card read the previous posts on setting it up RE: irq etc and you will save yourself a lot of headaches.

You can set up pro tools to use multiple drives for audio data to increase track count, though with my SCSI system I have never needed too.

In my experience UDMA is just no competition to UW SCSI, and now U2W SCSI 3 is becoming so cheap I just wouldn't bother going near UDMA.

Cheers,
Brett