Lil help with connection types please

[TheBigCheese]

Hi guys

Can anyone point me in the right direction regarding HDD connection types...

I'm all sorted regarding IDE and SATA but I might be needing to connect a SCSI or SAS hard drive in the near future and I haven't really got the foggiest what I would need to do.

What would be the cheapest (but reliable) way of connecting them to my motherboard?
I would imagine I would need to be able to connect 68 and 80 pin SCSI as well as SAS.
It would literally be for copying data onto to fill the drive up and disconnecting again.

Also here's a thought...do Apple Macs have all the same connections for HDDs? I know they have some funny type of RAM, do they for hard drives as well or are they all much of a muchness?

Many thanks in advance

 

[rpstewart]

For SAS and SCSI you'll need a dedicated controller card and I'm not aware of any which support both so you're looking at two cards. For SCSI it's not so bad, there are plenty of older PCI cards out there which can be picked up second hand pretty cheaply. 80 pin drives are just normal SCSI drives but with a hotswap combined power and data connector, 80-68pin adapters are easy to come by too.

SAS is going to be more expensive, the cards haven't been around that long so the second hand supply isn't as good. Looking on eBay SAS cards are £100+ whereas there are passable SCSI cards for under £10.

Do you have access to the machines the drives are in at the moment? Using those and an external HDD is going to be far easier if it's just a one time copy.