ethernet and switches, was Re: [rescue] Mozilla Firefox

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Mon, 26 Apr 2004 @ 15:07 +0000, Lionel Peterson said:

> > 4-way case is $114.  I still think that's expensive for what is
> > (probably) a stripped down vanilla PC case with a generic $10 power
> > supply.
> 
> Depends, add the cost of 4 single drive cases and 4 cables, and it
> might be reasonable.

...or it just means the single cases are even more unreasonable.

What I mean is $114 is a lot to pay for what looks to be $40 worth of
parts.

Of course, if no one sells them...

> I've bought many cases that look just like these, and have been very
> happy with the build/quality of them - now these may be different, but
> I can bet the actual cases are very good.

I have a 4-bay narrow SCSI case now that has my tape robot and one SCSI
drive.  It works fine, it is just a bit bulky for what it holds.

That's one thing I liked about the Sun 711 we had at work 2 years ago.
It packed a lot of drives into a relatively compact space if you had the
one with the dense backplane.

I have ideas for case designs that could stay cool and hold a lot of
drives, but I don't know anything about metal working.

One ideas is to enclose metal drive bays in some other material I can
work with.

My current case might be able to fit more drives in if I play a bit, but
then I'll probably have cooling troubles.  I'm still thinking about that
and how it might be solved.

> > Also notable is they don't sell mobile racks for SCSI.  I suppose that's
> > what SCA is for, but SCA backplanes/cases are expensive.
> 
> cold-swap drive trays are poor sellers in my exp. most folks like the
> idea of them, but (almost) never buy them... Once you power-down the
> case to remove a drive, you might just as well take a screwdriver to
> it and manually remove the drive, rather than spend $$ per drive for a
> convienience...

Well for me, it was a way of testing and switching operating systems.

Swapping a drive tray takes 30 seconds.  Opening up my case and
switching drives takes a great deal longer, and involves a lot of
profanity.



-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["I want this Perl software checked for
viruses.  Use Norton Antivirus." -- Charlie Kirkpatrick]