What to do with free SCSI drives??

[Louie1961a]

I was given a bunch of old scsi hard drives for free out of a surplused server from work. I have two 4.3 gb IBM ultrastar 2es U/W drives, and 2 quantum 22752 2.25GB W drives. Yesterday I picked up an adaptec 2940 U/W controller for $20. Everything works fine and I formatted all the disks to wipe them clean. Other than having more free space now, what can I do with the drives? Is it worth setting up software raid in Linux? How about in windows 98, is there anything I can do with these to help speed up my system? I have not used SCSI before, but I understand that SCSI is supposed to be faster, use less CPU resources, etc., so I am hoping there is someway to use this to my advantage. However, if it turns out to be just a free 12 GB of storage, I am OK with that!!

One other question, what is the fastest hard drive I can attach to the 2940 U/W? For instance, If I get ultra 160 drive that is backward compatible, like the Atlas 10K III, how much of a performance hit will the drive take by being on the 40MB/sec UW interface?

 

[SCSIRAID]

That's some pretty old iron there.... A modern IDE drive would likely have better performance and a factory warranty. The impact of putting an U160 drive on the Ultra controller depends on what you are doing with the drives. Putting it on the controller with all those other slow drives would most likely not be acceptable unless you are running short record (transaction like) workload and thus limited by seek time and not data rate.

If you arent buying the current generation SCSI then I would stay IDE.

 

[Smbu]

Putting an Atlas 10K III on that old UW card would not be advisable. That drive can sustain a max sustained transfer rate of I think +50MB/s(I don't remember the exact speed so check at StorageReview), so you would be killing some of it's performance.

 

[Louie1961a]

OK, let me ask this another way, are there any downlevel SCSI drives that can be had relatively cheaply, that would perform at least as well as my IDE drive, or is that asking too much from this old 2940u/W card?