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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!!