Trying To Get Two 300GB 15K SCSI Drives Working

[AustinMatherne]

My place of work, (the name of which I can?t say on here) throws all of its old hardware in a backroom. Now every couple of months some unlucky employee gets stuck with the job of throwing it all out, this time it was me. While most of its completely worthless, a couple of items stuck out to me, two 15K 300GB Seagate Cheetahs. Now my first impression was, the drives must be broken. So I asked a coworker to see if that was indeed the case, I came back the next day and he told me they were working great.
So now, I have two of these beasts sitting on my desk and I don?t have a clue what to do with them. I would like to hook them up to my home computer, but I?m not really familiar with SCSI, so I?m not sure how to do that.

My Computer Specs:
ASUS Striker Extreme
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
4GB of DDR2 800 RAM
Two BFG 8800GTX Water Cooled
Two 150GB Raptors in Raid 0
ASUS PhysX Card
Sound Blaster X-Fi Elite
PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 1KW-SR

I don?t know that much about SCSI but I do know that I need a PCI card. Problem is both of the PCI slots on the Striker are already being used. Could I get a PCI-e card and use it in the third PCI-e slot? More importantly would that cause any problems with the two 8800GTXs I have running in SLI?

Here? the info for the two Seagate drives.
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?l...VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD&reqPage=Model

Also would it be possible to run the two drives in raid 0?
If anyone can help me I would greatly appreciate it.

 

[vhx]

Text

EDIT: Those according to froogle, go for over $1000 each. They are fine and they were going to throw them out? Ask to be the guy who throws out the hardware next time.

 

[AustinMatherne]

Yeah I know.
I was going to try and sell them but I doubt I would be able to.

Edit:

Originally posted by: vhx
Ask to be the guy who throws out the hardware next time.

Lets just say I'll be taking out a lot of trash.

 

[Rubycon]

See if they have an LSi MegaRAID 320-2E sitting in the trash bin.

 

[V00D00]

"Up to 125-MB/s sustained transfer rate" **gasp*** That'll beat out your raptor's any day.

Get yourself a pci express SCSI RAID card. If you get a PCI card you won't be able to use the full bandwidth that the drives give. At least you won't get ultra high burst rates.

 

[krotchy]

Dude, sell them on craiglist or ebay. Way more worthwhile than in your home computer. You dont need the SCSI protocol for your home computer. SCSI really shines best when theres lots of random accesses. Plus they are going to be quite loud drives, 15K 300GB = meant for a data center.

However if not, I recommend a PCIe controller, it will last you longer and has a dedicated channel instead of PCI which is a bus. These drives might make a few things speed up such as boot times, but not by a whole lot. Those are impressive STR's but again you dont really need the SCSI protocol for a single user.

Still you have a beefy computer, sell those 2, buy 2 more Raptor 150's, get an Areca 1210 PCIe SATA Raid Controller and do a RAID 1+0 or Raid 5 on them for higher speed + redundancy. Youll still end up with several hundred bucks to spare I bet.

 

[KB24]

I have a SAS drive and they are louder than any drive I have ever heard. I could just imagine how loud SCSI drives . I say you post em up on ebay or CL and buy something else. You don't need that at all but if your like me and like to have the best of the best. Keep em and get a LSI SCSI Controller.

They're 228.99

You end up losing money when you could be making money .

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118038

 

[bob4432]

i have one of those drives i found off of craigslist for a crazy price ($100 ) and am using it on a u160 card.

imho, a fujitsu mas, mau or max drive would be better for a os/app/boot drive, so i use a smaller 36GB boot drive. the 15k.5 does have a amazing str - on my 32bit/33MHz u160 card my burst and avg str is 96MB/s - now mind you my pci bus is fully saturated. moving large amounts of data on a GbE lan maxes out at the receiving ends hdds max

if you are interested in selling them, drop me a pm as i have a lsi u320 raid 0,1,5,10 card i have been really wanting to try out.

or if you want to set them up on your current rig lmk and i will walk you through it so you don't break the bank

to answer the question from you op - the only pci-e u320 card you are going to get is a raid card - dell perc 4c or something like that (basically a rebadged lsi unit - cost can be $150-$300) if you do go a regular pci card, dont run them in raid - total waste since 1 will saturate your pci bus, pci-e - can't remember what the dell card is 4x? 8x?

as far as noise - no louder than my 7200rpm hdds but you need to actively cool them - they do get warm

pm if you have any questions