9fans archive / 2008 / 04 / 333 /    prev next

From: Charles Forsyth <forsyth@ter...>
Subject: Re: [9fans] LSI Logic 53C1030 SCSI
Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2008 19:24:05 +0100

> the payoff of getting a couple of old, slow, small drives
> going isn't quite there for me.  (actually i have two chassis with
> hot-swappable raid backplanes and 18gb drives.) you should get better
> performance out of a $50 ata hard drive these days.

recently i decided to archive a dozen or so different varieties of scsi
drive (fast/ultra/fast-wide/lvd) onto several big SATA drives
(they'd all have fit on one big SATA but i wanted to separate two categories).
when i started, i was idly wondering what to do with drives after i copied them--
surely i could use them in some constructive way.
after each copy i did md5sums of the original drive, and the partition holding
the copy on SATA.  after that, there was no question that i would take all the
SCSI drives for recycling.  the SATA drives are much, much faster that the `fastest'
of the old SCSI drives.

i've kept several types of Symbios card just in case i come across some more
data i'd like to copy from SCSI, but i'm unlikely to bother putting them in a machine.
i also had a SCSI QIC tape drive, but that broke down as soon as i started to copy
the data from the tapes, so all that went too. fortunately i'd copied those tapes onto
Zip drives years ago, and even more surprisingly, i could read those, so i copied that
data into my normal file system to sort through it.  if i'd begrudged the space, i could
have copied all the data onto a chunk of one of my tiny USB storage keys.

it's really not worth the time and effort trying to do a driver just to keep the SCSI drives in service.