Scsi drives in hot-swoppable caddies?

Madwelsh · 25 Sep 2006 at 09:41

Hi, I recently bought a megaraid scsi controller, now I'm planning on picking up some second hand scsi drives off the well known auction site. A lot of these come in caddies, or are 'hot-swoppable', the question is, can I remove them from the caddies and use them like a normal 3.5" hd, (so I know they'll fit into my case?)

TY in advance

rpstewart · 25 Sep 2006 at 10:38

You'll probably be able to remove them, most caddies I've seen are no more than trays which support the disks in a hot-swap cage. However any hot swap SCSI disk you pick up is likely to have an 80 pin SCA connector rather than the 68 way connector that you're card will be cabled for. This isn't a big deal, SCA is just a combined power and data connector and adapters are easy to come by.

cavemanoc · 25 Sep 2006 at 17:10

Yep, that about sums it up! Alternatively - I have found a good site in the states that does external enclosures for the 80pin scsi's (4 bay for about £80ish) - I'm seriously tempted to externalize my drives to cut down on heat and might come up with some sound dampening too! Failing that the 80-68 pin adapters can be had cheaply, but beware that you get fully u320 compliant ones, not the slower u160's!

(There should be no speed difference between the 68 and 80 pin drives, and the adapter should not impact performance either - just make sure it's good quality! If possible it's better to go for 80 pin as it gives you the option to go enclosure/hotswap later!)

Let us see the benchies once it's up and running and we can compare notes!

Madwelsh · 26 Sep 2006 at 10:52

going to have to wait til payday first lol!!! I went on holiday when there was loads of reasonably priced 15k scsi hd's about, they seem to have dried up now

Also I'm wondering what cables to get, but obviously I'll have to get the drives first to know what I'll need. Whats all this about a terminator? Like I said before, I'm a complete noob with scsi lol. Also I notice there's two internal ports on the pci-e card, do you need to stick a drive in each? or will just one ribbon cable be ok for raid? Cheers again bud

cavemanoc · 26 Sep 2006 at 11:20

Internal Ports: 1 for each of the channels - each channel can support 7(?) drives, so if you're just going for 1 array, stick all the drives on one port.

Cables: Plenty available but I'm told that quality does make a difference, so make sure it's u320 rated (I think mine are belkin as I like the brand!) Try to get them with several heads (5+ if possible) so you can add more drives later without having to buy more cabling - and remember, each cable must be terminated, and that takes up a head, ie. 5 heads=4 drives+1 terminator. (Terminator just 'earths' the signal to stop it bouncing back down the cable and interfering with the next one along, some cables come with them built in, others need to be bought - cost about £2 so don't worry about it

) - and you want LVD cables! - I think the adaptec ones are alright - but the 2cpu site has some good advice on this!

As discussed before, whether you get 80 or 68 pin drives makes no real difference to your selection of cables. You need to decide whether you want the drives internal, or external, then get the cables.

Internal: Cheapest and simplest option by far. Pick up a 5(or more) head u320 cable, plug it into one of the ports on the Dell, plug in the drives, enjoy much scsi goodness!

(if you do get 80pin drives, you just need to get a u320 rated adapter +/- £4 each and you're back in business! 68 pin plug straight in!

External: What I want to move to. Enclosures cost about £100, which gives you the box, the backplate (drives plug straight into it and are hot swappable) and a little psu. Easier on the heat and I'll be sound proofing mine if I ever get it. Different cables used as it's now using the port on the outside of the pci-e card. Perhaps worth using internal first and then if you upgrade later think about going external - another good reason to source 80pin instead of 68pin.

SETUP It is really easy - if you know how :rolleyes:

- always the way isn't it. There are a couple of little gotchas:

Drive ID Unlike Sata/IDE drives where the cable decides what to call each drive, you have to manually identify each drive through the jumpers that come with it. Once you've got your drives we can chat more about the specifics of ID'ing each drive, but for now remember that 7 is taken by the controller card.

Phew... and that's about it. Plug them in, boot up (hold fingers!) and when prompted press <ctrl>M to enter the card setup screen. Again - really simple if you've done it before - I left all the settings as they were (will tweak later) and just set up a Raid 0 array of my two cards.

Simple hey? :eek:

Give me a shout when it happens if you need any more help!

Madwelsh · 26 Sep 2006 at 11:31

you are a superstar, I always knew you were

Like I said I'm just waiting on some cash owed to me at the minute, (landlord owes me about 2k for work and materials!!) So hopefully in the next couple of weeks I'll be up and running. I'm slowly trying to get my post count up, so I should be able to pm you soon and all, which will make things a tad easier!

Cheers again

Madwelsh · 20 Oct 2006 at 18:01

Woot, finally paid what I was owed, and finally managed to find some maxtor atlas drives at a reasonable price. £116 for 2 x 73gig inc postage

I thought it was worth waiting for

The drives are 80 pin, I also purchased 5 port scsi u320 68pin cable with terminator (even rounded!!). Now about the 80 to 68 converter, I'll need two no? It basically just allows you to stick a normal molex in to power them?

Also, I have both a dfi nf4 sli D, and a dfi nf4 expert. I only use one pcie slot, which one do you stick the mega raid contoller in? I have a x1900xtx which I've stuck a zalman cooler on, (takes up much room) so I'm wondering an I stick the graphics on the lowest pcie slot? Also will I have to change any bios settings to get the megaraid running at full speed?

Cheers mate

AndyC · 21 Oct 2006 at 09:25

Sounds good, scsi's fly - just be very careful on which adaptors you buy, most of the 80 to 68pin adaptors don't run at the full speed and downgrade the performance.

I had a few and the only one that worked at full speed came from the states from the bay Model No (SCA2-F80BP-1DV) very well built with dip switches instead of jumpers etc £20 ish

Good luck it's well worth it

cavemanoc · 22 Oct 2006 at 11:27

Well - I've just picked up a couple of '320' 80-60 pins, it's not the sca2 model, but hopefully it will run at full speed anyway - will have to bench and see

(and yes - it was the £3 one not the £20 one!)

Madwelsh · 23 Oct 2006 at 13:38

cavemanoc said:
Well - I've just picked up a couple of '320' 80-60 pins, it's not the sca2 model, but hopefully it will run at full speed anyway - will have to bench and see (and yes - it was the £3 one not the £20 one!)

Madwelsh said:
Now about the 80 to 68 converter, I'll need two no? It basically just allows you to stick a normal molex in to power them?

Also, I have both a dfi nf4 sli D, and a dfi nf4 expert. I only use one pcie slot, which one do you stick the mega raid contoller in? I have a x1900xtx which I've stuck a zalman cooler on, (takes up much room) so I'm wondering an I stick the graphics on the lowest pcie slot? Also will I have to change any bios settings to get the megaraid running at full speed?

Cheers mate

So how have you setup your card? have you put the g card in pcie slot 2 and the megaraid in pcie slot 1? Sorry, I should be getting the drives next day or so, I just need to be sure I'm setting it up correctly!

Cheers in advance

cavemanoc · 23 Oct 2006 at 20:17

There's a lot of debate about that over on 2cpu - I'm running mine with the GFX card in the top slot and the Dell in the second - I would have set it up the other way round but I've got stuff in the pci slot below and the cooler on the x1900 is waaaaay to big for that

With the expert at least you've got plenty of space between the slots so you should be fine!

The final answer seemed to be try and see - my setup still isn't perfect - for some reason when I shut down I have to cut power to the mobo or it won't boot next time - odd, but at least it's consistant and I've got a work around!

Just make sure you set both slots to 8x and it should work in either.

Madwelsh · 28 Oct 2006 at 13:54

ok, I now have the drives, how do you set them as drive 0, drive 1, etc, I don't see any jumpers, I can set them using jumpers on the 80 to 68 pin converter block, but I'm worried if the drives aren't also set the same there will be a problem?

Does setting the pcie lanes to 8x affect the g card performance?

Cheers in advance

rpstewart · 28 Oct 2006 at 14:08

80pin drives don't have jumpers to set the SCSI ID, that's set by the backplane that the drive plugs into, the idea being you can hot plug a drive into the backplane without having to worry how it was set - all sorts of nasty things could happen if you hot plugged a drive with the SCSI ID set incorrectly.

In your case the converter is in effect the backplane and hence you'll need to set the IDs appropriately on each.

Not sure about the PCIe question, I assume you've got the Dell card in one 16x slot and the GFX card in the other? Depending on the board in question then you'll either retain 16 lanes to each or split them between the two solts (2*8). I don't think you'll lose anything from the GFX card, even PCIe 1x bandwidth is huge.

Madwelsh · 29 Oct 2006 at 01:11

rpstewart said:
80pin drives don't have jumpers to set the SCSI ID, that's set by the backplane that the drive plugs into, the idea being you can hot plug a drive into the backplane without having to worry how it was set - all sorts of nasty things could happen if you hot plugged a drive with the SCSI ID set incorrectly.

In your case the converter is in effect the backplane and hence you'll need to set the IDs appropriately on each.

Not sure about the PCIe question, I assume you've got the Dell card in one 16x slot and the GFX card in the other? Depending on the board in question then you'll either retain 16 lanes to each or split them between the two solts (2*8). I don't think you'll lose anything from the GFX card, even PCIe 1x bandwidth is huge.

i got the sli-d dfi, so i guess i need to set the long jumpery things to 8x8 yeah? Well i'm giving it a whirl tomorrow, wish me luck

ty

cavemanoc · 29 Oct 2006 at 11:49

Yep - you need to set the lanes to 8x and 8x as the Dell won't run at 1x and you certainly don't want the Gfx running slow - 8x is more than enough for the GFX card.

Hopefully your converters came with the jumper guide so it should be simple to set up the ID's, just remember that the Dell card is 7 so don't try setting a drive to that

Good luck - hope it goes well - shout if anything goes wrong (and remember that if you are running a single drive it must be set up as a Raid 0 array or it won't be recognised!)

You running windows on one of your scsi drives or have you got another IDE/sata for that - can be a bit tricky to set up if you are planning to run windows off one of the 'dell' drives as they don't support XP :mad:

Madwelsh · 1 Nov 2006 at 18:26

cavemanoc said:
Yep - you need to set the lanes to 8x and 8x as the Dell won't run at 1x and you certainly don't want the Gfx running slow - 8x is more than enough for the GFX card.

Hopefully your converters came with the jumper guide so it should be simple to set up the ID's, just remember that the Dell card is 7 so don't try setting a drive to that

Good luck - hope it goes well - shout if anything goes wrong (and remember that if you are running a single drive it must be set up as a Raid 0 array or it won't be recognised!)

You running windows on one of your scsi drives or have you got another IDE/sata for that - can be a bit tricky to set up if you are planning to run windows off one of the 'dell' drives as they don't support XP

Ok you got a linky to the altered lsi drivers I can use when pressing f6 at winxp installation? Just praying this shizzle works lol.

TY

cavemanoc · 2 Nov 2006 at 11:55

I couldn't get them to work for the F6 bit - just use the windows 2000 drivers and they work fine! Then in windows use the LSI drivers and use the manual selection bit to force it to use the Megaraid 2e drivers - worked a treat!

Madwelsh · 2 Nov 2006 at 12:51

cavemanoc said:
I couldn't get them to work for the F6 bit - just use the windows 2000 drivers and they work fine! Then in windows use the LSI drivers and use the manual selection bit to force it to use the Megaraid 2e drivers - worked a treat!

thanks again mate, in the middle of like 6 long days of work at the minute.. but trying to get round to doing this lol!!

cavemanoc · 2 Nov 2006 at 17:04

Just one last bit of advice before I forget - the bios settings are hugely important if you intend to boot off the scsi array and I spent about a week tearing my hair out trying to get the damn thing to go!

Check out the thread Here

Long and the short was that in the list of Hdd's to boot off you have to have Add in Cards as the top option - NOT the Perc 4e! Not sure why this is, but it seems it must be the Card, and not the actual drive that is selected for boot

KarlMcWade · 3 Nov 2006 at 03:35

scsi rock once you have sampled them there is no going back, its not just the raw speed but the tasty access times and the 2 % cpu usage and not 10% plus of normal drives

raptor ha

enjoy this was on a pci card too (the bottleneck :mad:

)

I have a raid 0 setup of fuj's Mau's IMHO fastest real world scsi drive.
Atlas II have a lower average speed and only just beat the mau's by 3mbs at the sharp point but loose out every were else.