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SCSI Hard Drive – Useful?

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Hello again.

I have a chance to get a Seagate Cheetah LVD SCSI hard drive fairly cheap. I thought it might make a nice external drive, but have no idea if it is possible to adapt this to suit my Gigabyte M55 motherboard. I have looked up the subject but there is a bewildering range of connectors, cables adapters and so on, so please tell me if it’s a waste of time!!

Best

Paul

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Clarifications

In reply to SCSI Hard Drive – Useful?

Clarifications

Paul unless you can get a suitable SCSI Card and Cable

In reply to SCSI Hard Drive – Useful?

Very cheaply don’t bother. You need a SCSI Plug In Card to mount this Drive and it needs to be one of the 16 Bit Wide ones SCSI 3 Standard.

I’m not sure on the exact model of this drive but I would imagine that it needs to be fitted to a case to be used externally and these are not the Run of the Mill USB Caddies it would have to be a Wide SCSI Case and other than places like HP, IBM and the like they wouldn’t be available. I’m not even sure that they actually are available either as these 68 Pin SCSI’s are generally Internal Drives.

The Cheetah Family of Drives are all Wide SCSI and very good fast drives the LVD stands for Low Voltage Differential and is a type of technology that has been developed to increase the Data Transfer Rates of SCSI Drives.

I hope that is of some assistance Paul.

Col

Sexy Technology

In reply to Paul unless you can get a suitable SCSI Card and Cable

Thanks. I really shouldn’t bother I think!

The HD is a 3.5 inch internal drive designed for desktop. Apparently it runs at 15000 rpm and has 68GB capacity.

Trouble is I do find this sort of thing very interesting but of course in reality have absolutely no need for this super speed.

Since I wrote my question I have discovered that there are SCSI/PCI adapters, but all the decent ones seem to be in the USA!

Thanks again

Paul

Most SCSI Controllers

In reply to Sexy Technology

Are now PCI Cards. The days of On Board SCSI are now long gone on all but a very few M’Boards and they are all Server Boards.

Besides the Rotational Speed of the drive doesn’t make it transfer data any faster it’s the SCSI Standard that allows this.

Besides 68 GIG are very small even today and the biggest thing against SCSI Drives is their capacity. Three times as expensive for less than half the capacity doesn’t make much sense these days when you have SATA Drives at the same price as IDE.

Besides these SCSI Drives are really noisy. 😉

Col

Noise

In reply to Most SCSI Controllers

When I was a little boy, people used to make a little joke thus:

“What noise annoys an oyster?”
A. “A noisy noise annoys an oyster.”

I meant to ask about this aspect: I was amazed to find out that the thing ran at 15,000 rpm.

Thanks for the help, I think it’s a dead duck – especially since I can buy an 80gb SATA HD (Hitachi or Western Digital with 8MB cache) for about ?34 – say $55 US.
As for the size, my newer computer has 300GB and I wonder what all this space is for! A friend tells me he has a new Mac with 1TB inside and another TB outside. I asked him “what for?” and he hasn’t replied!

Thanks again.

Paul

Not really…

In reply to SCSI Hard Drive – Useful?

If you are just thinking desktop, I wouldn’t bother with the SCSI. You could most likely find a USB/firewire ext HDD, or a SATA drive more beneficial.
If you have a server Mobo w/ SCSI, then if is most likely worth it.
Regards.

Not really

In reply to Not really…

Thanks, as I have written above, I think it’s not worth pursuing, given that new SATA HDs are so cheap.

Best wishes

Paul

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