I've been building and fixing my own PC's for nearly 10 years now, but in all that time I've somehow never had to deal with SCSI drives

anything I should know ?
any free guides, tips, tricks.....

otherwise I'll have to resort to wikipedia when things don't work

cheers
-Robert

if your taling just scsi and no raid then not really, just have to load the raid controler drivers at when windows setup says press f6 to install additoinal drivers.

scsi is pretty old now though, have a look at sas

Most important thing is termination.

Need a SCSI controller card. You can have up to 8 devices on one line of communication. In the old days you could buy SCSI scanners and would have to set the parameters on the device between 0 and 7.

If not then this old paradox rings all so true!!

System Can't See it!!

Good luck.

PS It may be an idea to familiarise yourself with SCSI on wikipedioa anyway...

As above too, terminate with a 5 ohm resistor if I remember correctly...

[Edited on 12/11/08 by AndyGT]

I've done a raid array before with SATA's on my main machine

I've got 2 or 3 MB's with SCSI controlers built in (and an old ISA controler card somewhere but I don't think I want to go that far backwards)

the discs are out of a few old machines at work, they are just big enough to be useful so I was thinking about sticking a bunch of them in an old machine

[Edited on 12/11/08 by mcerd1]

Have a look on Adaptecs web site - you'll find all you need to know there.

Incidentally, you can fit 15 devices on any controller that supports SCSI3 and above.

SCSI drives tend to last longer and are certainly quicker than PATA, SATA, etc. Most are 10 or 15K RPM but tend to make more noise, and need better cooling. Hence their use in servers rather than home computers.

Connecting the drives to a single RAID card will allow you to configure them as one large partition.

[Edited on 12/11/08 by sickbag]

I think perhaps you are thinking of SATA not SCSI --- SCSI is pretty ancient technolgy outside the server world at least.

If you want to do an array of disc for raid go SATA

definatly SCSI, they've come from old CAD machines (very expencive ones when new) but they are mostly just 7200rpm discs

I'm not looking to put them in a raid array, I'd have to buy new bits for that - I'm more thinking along the lines of a locost backup machine (=£0 )

it'd be a late P3 / early P4 running Win2K (legit copy came with one of the old machines) with as much storage as I can fit in it

what size are they? i'd guess that compared to the cost of new SATA drives these days they're not worth the hassle.

[Edited on 12/11/08 by gingerprince]

You can buy a 1tb SATA drive for < £100 these days. Some old SCSI drives are just not worth the hassle.

SCISI bus always was a PITA --- really better to forget it.

Well I remember the days of one faulty printer taking down the whole bank of machines on the chain, and the fun I used to have re-arranging cables until I'd found which of the 8 devices was the one stopping a PC from booting into w2k...

I almost miss it