If anyone is looking for any extra storage for there audio or video
equipment please let me know. We specialize in av rated disk drives. We are
very good on prices.

--
Thanks
Kenny Becker
Select Computer Technology
253-639-4359
425-443-8062

In article writes:

If anyone is looking for any extra storage for there audio or video
equipment please let me know. We specialize in av rated disk drives. We are
very good on prices.

Can you beat the special buys and rebate deals that the "consumer"
stores have been offering lately?

I just bought a Maxtor 60 GB IDE drive with 8 MB buffer for $39.95 at
Staples, and someone pointed to an 80 GB one at Micro Center with an
end price of $29.95 after instant rebate, mail-in rebate to Maxtor,
Mail-in rebate to Micro Center, a can of food for the needy, a
partridge, a pear tree, and of course you have to pay the postage. But
it's still only $29.95. g

--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
news:znr1098315089k@trad
In article
writes:

If anyone is looking for any extra storage for there audio or video
equipment please let me know. We specialize in av rated disk drives.
We are very good on prices.

Can you beat the special buys and rebate deals that the "consumer"
stores have been offering lately?

I just bought a Maxtor 60 GB IDE drive with 8 MB buffer for $39.95 at
Staples, and someone pointed to an 80 GB one at Micro Center with an
end price of $29.95 after instant rebate, mail-in rebate to Maxtor,
Mail-in rebate to Micro Center, a can of food for the needy, a
partridge, a pear tree, and of course you have to pay the postage. But
it's still only $29.95. g

Just guessing, but it looks like the switch to SATA is on, and the old is
out and in with the new.

Arny wrote:

Just guessing, but it looks like the switch to SATA is on, and the old is
out and in with the new.

Is that good or bad?

Are the SATA "better" than the ATA IDE drives?


--Wayne

-"sounded good to me"-

Just guessing, but it looks like the switch to SATA is on, and the old is
out and in with the new.

Is that good or bad?

Are the SATA "better" than the ATA IDE drives?


The data is potentially faster, and they use a simpler cable. The bottleneck
is still reading data off the platters, so RPM is the key. Neither ATAPI
(EIDE) nor SATA transfer data anywhere near their max ratings because of
this. Eventually the BIOS dudes will make it easy to put half a dozen SATA
drives on a single motherboard.

SATA is cool, but it's not a big deal.

-John O

"Wayne" wrote in message
...
Arny wrote:

Just guessing, but it looks like the switch to SATA is on, and the old is
out and in with the new.

Is that good or bad?

Are the SATA "better" than the ATA IDE drives?

One, the parts for the connection in a PC cheaper, so BOM costs are lower.
Two, SATA allows a faster bit throughput and also provides for command
queuing. Or, that's what the R&D engineer working on future HDD products
over the cubicle wall says.

Glenn D.

"Wayne" wrote in message


Arny wrote:

Just guessing, but it looks like the switch to SATA is on, and the
old is out and in with the new.

Is that good or bad?

In the long run, it appears that SATA solves a number of old problems, while
adding fewer new problems.

Right now many of the same basic drives can be same with either interface.
Any performance differences are likely due to anything but the interface.

Are the SATA "better" than the ATA IDE drives?

Most of the problems that SATA solve appear to be more important to the
manufacturers than us users.

Still not satisfied with SATA, but I haven't tried it with RAID. But my
EIDE UDMA mode 5 drives outperform my single 120 GB SATA by bunches.

--


Roger W. Norman
SirMusic Studio

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
news:znr1098315089k@trad
In article
writes:

If anyone is looking for any extra storage for there audio or video
equipment please let me know. We specialize in av rated disk drives.
We are very good on prices.

Can you beat the special buys and rebate deals that the "consumer"
stores have been offering lately?

I just bought a Maxtor 60 GB IDE drive with 8 MB buffer for $39.95 at
Staples, and someone pointed to an 80 GB one at Micro Center with an
end price of $29.95 after instant rebate, mail-in rebate to Maxtor,
Mail-in rebate to Micro Center, a can of food for the needy, a
partridge, a pear tree, and of course you have to pay the postage. But
it's still only $29.95. g

Just guessing, but it looks like the switch to SATA is on, and the old is
out and in with the new.

Still not satisfied with SATA, but I haven't tried it with RAID. But my
EIDE UDMA mode 5 drives outperform my single 120 GB SATA by bunches.

Thanks for that tip Roger, I almost bought a SATA drive last month but ended up
with not enough cash in my pocket so I bought the cheaper EIDE. Works great for
me but interested for the future.


John A. Chiara
SOS Recording Studio
Live Sound Inc.
Albany, NY
www.sosrecording.net
518-449-1637

"Roger W. Norman" wrote in message
...
Still not satisfied with SATA, but I haven't tried it with RAID. But my
EIDE UDMA mode 5 drives outperform my single 120 GB SATA by bunches.

--


I'm about to find out how a SATA RAID performs. In the meantime, my 120 GB
EIDE UDMA drive provides:
50.44 MB/S Linear Read
3.012 MB/s Random Read
Access Time 9.2

Compared with a 160 GB SATA Drive @
54.134 MB/s Linear Read
3.042 MB/s Random Read
Access Time 8.9 ms

Seems to indicate that SATA drives are marginally faster as most of what I
read says. I do like the skinny little cables ;-) And, the prices are not
very far apart these days.

Steve King

Roger W. Norman wrote:
Still not satisfied with SATA, but I haven't tried it with RAID. But my
EIDE UDMA mode 5 drives outperform my single 120 GB SATA by bunches.

Same manufacturer and model series?

In article writes:

Just guessing, but it looks like the switch to SATA is on, and the old is
out and in with the new.

Thereby supporting my prediction that before you know it, you won't be
able to find hardware to read your old disk drives unless you go to
the antique shop.



--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

Well, no, the SATA is a 120 gig WD Caviar w/8 mb cache and the EIDE is 80
gig WD Caviar w/8 mb cache. But there's a significant difference that
probably can only be attributed to the SATA interface chipset or drivers.

I'm just keeping to my 18 gig 15k rpm SCSIs although I'm moving them to an
Adaptec 39160 from my 2940. And my 33 gig one gigabit Fibrechannel still
kicks butt on the Athlon 1600+. Instead of depending on SATA right now I'm
mostly considering moving the drives over to the A64, hence my reason for
not plopping down another $90 for another SATA 120 gig drive and trying out
the SATA RAID.

--


Roger W. Norman
SirMusic Studio

"Kurt Albershardt" wrote in message
...
Roger W. Norman wrote:
Still not satisfied with SATA, but I haven't tried it with RAID. But my
EIDE UDMA mode 5 drives outperform my single 120 GB SATA by bunches.

Same manufacturer and model series?

In article writes:

Just guessing, but it looks like the switch to SATA is on, and the old
is
out and in with the new.

Thereby supporting my prediction that before you know it, you won't be
able to find hardware to read your old disk drives unless you go to
the antique shop.


While all these new-fangled drive technologies come and go, I wonder if a
small, but stable supply of SCSI hardware will remain available, even if at
inflated prices? I really didn't have a choice with my hard disk recorder,
SCSI was the standard offering. But now I need to build an archiving system
and it would be very easy to go with another SCSI system that allows me to
just pop in my drives from the recorder. But will I be the only guy still
using SCSI in a few years?

steve

hollywood_steve wrote:
In article writes:


before you know it, you won't be able to
find hardware to read your old disk drives unless you go to
the antique shop.



While all these new-fangled drive technologies come and go, I wonder if a
small, but stable supply of SCSI hardware will remain available, even if at
inflated prices?

For a few years anyway.



I need to build an archiving system
and it would be very easy to go with another SCSI system that allows me to
just pop in my drives from the recorder.

I would definitely include a compatible SCSI bay in the design, to facilitate the transfers.

For the archive itself I'd probably choose a SATA RAID setup--most likely RAID 5 for an archive. ATA becuase of price/size/value, SATA because it's going to replace PATA and the price differential is negligible now. The more important aspect for archiving would be to run a checksum on all the files and regularly reverify their integrity.

Sorry, Kurt, but SATA doesn't do anything but RAID 0 or RAID 1. It's a two
drive bus, unless you can add something to the class that says it has the
ability to physically link multiple SATA cards onto a single bus that allows
RAID 0+1 or any other RAID system. I've not seen any cards that allow sync
code between two cards, and the initial bus is only two encompassing two
drives.

SCSI is by far still the best bet for performance and multiples of RAID
technologies.

--


Roger W. Norman
SirMusic Studio

"Kurt Albershardt" wrote in message
...
hollywood_steve wrote:
In article
writes:


before you know it, you won't be able to
find hardware to read your old disk drives unless you go to
the antique shop.



While all these new-fangled drive technologies come and go, I wonder if
a
small, but stable supply of SCSI hardware will remain available, even if
at
inflated prices?

For a few years anyway.



I need to build an archiving system
and it would be very easy to go with another SCSI system that allows me
to
just pop in my drives from the recorder.

I would definitely include a compatible SCSI bay in the design, to
facilitate the transfers.

For the archive itself I'd probably choose a SATA RAID setup--most likely
RAID 5 for an archive. ATA becuase of price/size/value, SATA because it's
going to replace PATA and the price differential is negligible now. The
more important aspect for archiving would be to run a checksum on all the
files and regularly reverify their integrity.

Roger W. Norman wrote:
For the archive itself I'd probably choose a SATA RAID setup--most likely
RAID 5 for an archive. ATA becuase of price/size/value, SATA because it's
going to replace PATA and the price differential is negligible now. The
more important aspect for archiving would be to run a checksum on all the
files and regularly reverify their integrity.

Sorry, Kurt, but SATA doesn't do anything but RAID 0 or RAID 1. It's a two
drive bus, unless you can add something to the class that says it has the
ability to physically link multiple SATA cards onto a single bus that allows
RAID 0+1 or any other RAID system. I've not seen any cards that allow sync
code between two cards, and the initial bus is only two encompassing two
drives.

SATA is a one drive bus (and this is a GOOD thing,) but there are plennty of multiport RAID cards from the likes of 3Ware. We have three 24-drive SATA array systems (12 drives per controller) which are 4TB and under $15k.

http://3ware.com/products/serial_ata9000.asp




SCSI is by far still the best bet for performance and multiples of
RAID technologies.

Performance in terms of transactions per second, yes--but this is due to the drive construction and not the bus.

For archiving of large digital files you need maximum storage space per dollar and ATA walks all over SCSI there.

Chel van Gennip wrote:
On Thu, 21 Oct 2004 17:03:14 +0200, Wayne wrote:

Are the SATA "better" than the ATA IDE drives?

At the moment not, in the future yes.

Just to clarify--at the moment they are identical underneath (especially for the non-Seagate drives which use a PATA-SATA translation chip.)



It is propable that mission-critical
raid arrays will move to SATA, so the top level drives
will be available in SATA.

Yes, but there is also SAS coming (Serial Attached SCSI.) Early info looked like this was a last gasp effort from Adaptec to maintain their SCSI hegemony, but more recent releases are showing promise. They were smart enough to adopt the SATA connectors, cabling, and low-level signaling but have added dual attachment ports per drive a la FC.

SCSI is by far still the best bet for performance and multiples of
RAID technologies.

Performance in terms of transactions per second, yes--but this is due to the drive construction and not the bus.

For archiving of large digital files you need maximum storage space per dollar and ATA walks all over SCSI there.

Not in my case, and when it comes to the SCSI discussion, the question
concerned my specific situation. I am concerned only with long term
accessibility; I record between 2 and 8 track s per project, so
maximum capacity or "gigs per dollar" don't come into play. Just
which system will allow me to access my small archive several years
down the road.

To put things into perspective, I currently have two 18gig drives, and
I have gotten along fine with that being my total capacity. I figure
that a single 300 gig hard drive will cover me needs for at least a
decade. (with occasional cleanouts of files determined to be no
longer worth archiving.) My priorities when I selected these two 18g
drives were #1 performance, #2 durability/reliability. The 15k rpm
SCSI drives were the top performers available when they were released
two years ago and they also got high marks for reliability. At the
time I purchased them (April, 03), I could have purchased a few
hundred gig worth of non-SCSI drives for less than the two 18g drives
cost. But capacity is a distant 3rd behind performance and long term
reliability.

steve

In article writes:

While all these new-fangled drive technologies come and go, I wonder if a
small, but stable supply of SCSI hardware will remain available, even if at
inflated prices?

Probably, at least for a while yet. It's still possible to get 20 or
30 GB IDE drives (the standard Mackie hard disk recorder won't
recognize anything larger than 30 GB) but given that there's always
somebody with a rebate going, I can buy 80 to 120 GB drive for about
the same price and the $50 BIOS upgrade pays for itself in a couple of
projects (if the drives are on my nickel) Of course if the client is
paying for the drive, who cares? Well, I don't like to be called a
ripper-offer for charging them $80 for a measly 20 GB drive.


--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

hollywood_steve wrote:
SCSI is by far still the best bet for performance and multiples
of RAID technologies.

Performance in terms of transactions per second, yes--but this is due to the drive construction and not the bus.

For archiving of large digital files you need maximum storage space per dollar and ATA walks all over SCSI there.


Not in my case, and when it comes to the SCSI discussion, the question
concerned my specific situation. I am concerned only with long term
accessibility; I record between 2 and 8 track s per project, so
maximum capacity or "gigs per dollar" don't come into play. Just
which system will allow me to access my small archive several years
down the road.

I was about to ask how small, but...




To put things into perspective, I currently have two 18gig drives, and
I have gotten along fine with that being my total capacity. I figure
that a single 300 gig hard drive will cover me needs for at least a
decade. (with occasional cleanouts of files determined to be no
longer worth archiving.)

Go buy yourself two 300G SATA drives with whatever removeable housing you like. Keep copies on both, and store one offsite. Re-verify the files using checksum once a year.

You'll most likely need to buy replacement drives in 4-5 years, but they will probably be terabyte drives and cost $199.

Chel van Gennip wrote:

A side effect of capacity is speed. With higher density you also get a
higher transfer rate. The 18G 15Krpm drives got their speed from fast
rotation. Fast rotation means more power consumption, more noise, and
shorter lifetime.

Yes, and this is some basic physics that many people overlook.






For long term reliability storing archive projects on DVD is a good
aproach. DVD's will be readable on standard equipment for a number of
years.

As long as you keep multiple copies in different locations and (again) validate the integrity of the data annually. This is the part most people skip and the consequences are big.





For a on-line archive I use a Linux server with two large IDE drives, the
second IDE drive is a (rsync) mirror of the first one and only on-line
during synchonising. Files on the first drive are made read-only after
completion of a project. This way I avoid problems caused by hardware
failures, software failures, virusses, human failures etc.

Similar to what I am designing now, but my task is very large so we will be using two Linux servers in different cities, running multi-terabyte RAID arrays and rsynced.

In article writes:

I am concerned only with long term
accessibility; I record between 2 and 8 track s per project, so
maximum capacity or "gigs per dollar" don't come into play. Just
which system will allow me to access my small archive several years
down the road.

Analog tape or disk. For short term, like five years, you're probably
safe with anything that has already been around for at least five
years but fewer than 20. But the application of rapidly advancing
consumer technology to recording means dealing with consumer-accepted
obsolescence. The price you pay for inexpensive and efficient storage
is that you have to either replace it with whatever's in vogue every
now and then or you have to take the job on yourself to maintain a way
to retrieve your data. Save your old PCs.


--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

Cool, but maybe a little off the beaten path of just attaching a SATA drive
to one's computer. I had both an Adaptec card and the onboard SATA setup,
both being two drives controlled by one chip (yes, two separate busses).
I'm not surprised that there are manufacturers running multiple busses from
one card, but you have to admit that $15k is a bit of money and possibly a
little stretch for anyone but a pro that does video archiving, etc. So, for
the purposes of what I was describing, SATA only does RAID 0 and 1.

--


Roger W. Norman
SirMusic Studio

"Kurt Albershardt" wrote in message
...
Roger W. Norman wrote:
For the archive itself I'd probably choose a SATA RAID setup--most
likely
RAID 5 for an archive. ATA becuase of price/size/value, SATA because
it's
going to replace PATA and the price differential is negligible now.
The
more important aspect for archiving would be to run a checksum on all
the
files and regularly reverify their integrity.

Sorry, Kurt, but SATA doesn't do anything but RAID 0 or RAID 1. It's a
two
drive bus, unless you can add something to the class that says it has
the
ability to physically link multiple SATA cards onto a single bus that
allows
RAID 0+1 or any other RAID system. I've not seen any cards that allow
sync
code between two cards, and the initial bus is only two encompassing two
drives.

SATA is a one drive bus (and this is a GOOD thing,) but there are plennty
of multiport RAID cards from the likes of 3Ware. We have three 24-drive
SATA array systems (12 drives per controller) which are 4TB and under $15k.

http://3ware.com/products/serial_ata9000.asp




SCSI is by far still the best bet for performance and multiples of
RAID technologies.

Performance in terms of transactions per second, yes--but this is due to
the drive construction and not the bus.

For archiving of large digital files you need maximum storage space per
dollar and ATA walks all over SCSI there.

Mike Rivers wrote:
Probably, at least for a while yet. It's still possible to get 20 or
30 GB IDE drives (the standard Mackie hard disk recorder won't
recognize anything larger than 30 GB) but given that there's always
somebody with a rebate going, I can buy 80 to 120 GB drive for about
the same price and the $50 BIOS upgrade pays for itself in a couple of
projects (if the drives are on my nickel) Of course if the client is
paying for the drive, who cares? Well, I don't like to be called a
ripper-offer for charging them $80 for a measly 20 GB drive.

don't a few drive manufacturers still offer the ability to jumper larger
drives down to 32GB?

--
Aaron J. Grier | "Not your ordinary poofy goof." |
"someday the industry will have throbbing frontal lobes and will be able
to write provably correct software. also, I want a pony." -- Zach Brown

Roger W. Norman wrote:
Cool, but maybe a little off the beaten path of just attaching a SATA drive
to one's computer. I had both an Adaptec card and the onboard SATA setup,
both being two drives controlled by one chip (yes, two separate busses).

That's the sweet spot in the market right now, so that's what comes on mass-market motherboards.



I'm not surprised that there are manufacturers running multiple busses from
one card, but you have to admit that $15k is a bit of money and possibly a
little stretch for anyone but a pro that does video archiving, etc.

Sure $15k sounds like a lot of money to some of us--but it wasn't very long ago (in inflation-corrected dollars) that $15k barely got you a decent two-track recorder.

For less than that you can now have capacity that until *very* recently was out of the financial reach of all but the largest corporations on the planet.




So, for the purposes
of what I was describing, SATA only does RAID 0 and 1.

You were comparing a low-end consumer implementation of SATA with an enterprise implementation of SCSI. I was merely pointing out that SATA has uses in both worlds.

In article writes:

don't a few drive manufacturers still offer the ability to jumper larger
drives down to 32GB?

Yes, but they don't always come out to 32 GB. It's a function of how
the BIOS interprets what the drive tries to fool it into thinking it
is. I had a 40 GB Western Digital, I think - could have been Maxtor,
that, with the cylinder limit jumper in place, came out to 2.1 GB in
my Mackie hard disk recorder. When I called the drive manufacturer's
tech support to ask if there were alternate settings for changing the
apparent size, they told me that was it. It would either be 32 GB,
8B, or 2 GB. That was over two years ago. I haven't tried a more
modern one.

Good thing Best Buy took it back cheerfully.


--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

But the application of rapidly advancing
consumer technology to recording means dealing with consumer-accepted
obsolescence. The price you pay for inexpensive and efficient storage
is that you have to either replace it with whatever's in vogue every
now and then or you have to take the job on yourself to maintain a way
to retrieve your data.

This is exactly why I was hoping that SCSI might be a smart solution.
It has already fallen off the radar of anyone following consumer
trends. My hope is that there are enough legacy SCSI archives in
studios, offices and industry that a small service industry will
continue to support the technology. (completely ignored by the larger
IT industry who will have developed, exploited and abandoned a dozen
different technologies during the time that I'm slowly filling up that
single 300G drive.) SCSI's very irrelevance should be it's greatest
strength when it comes to survival. The fact that 99.5% of the IT
world will have moved on, leaving SCSI to a small world of "power
users" who utilize SCSI because it's in place, it works, and its
dependable; not because it came bundled with the Windows 2012 OS or
MAC OS13.

steve

That's why RAID means redundant array of INEXPENSIVE disks! g

--


Roger W. Norman
SirMusic Studio

"Kurt Albershardt" wrote in message
...
Roger W. Norman wrote:
Cool, but maybe a little off the beaten path of just attaching a SATA
drive
to one's computer. I had both an Adaptec card and the onboard SATA
setup,
both being two drives controlled by one chip (yes, two separate busses).

That's the sweet spot in the market right now, so that's what comes on
mass-market motherboards.



I'm not surprised that there are manufacturers running multiple busses
from
one card, but you have to admit that $15k is a bit of money and possibly
a
little stretch for anyone but a pro that does video archiving, etc.

Sure $15k sounds like a lot of money to some of us--but it wasn't very
long ago (in inflation-corrected dollars) that $15k barely got you a decent
two-track recorder.

For less than that you can now have capacity that until *very* recently
was out of the financial reach of all but the largest corporations on the
planet.




So, for the purposes
of what I was describing, SATA only does RAID 0 and 1.

You were comparing a low-end consumer implementation of SATA with an
enterprise implementation of SCSI. I was merely pointing out that SATA has
uses in both worlds.

Roger W. Norman wrote:
That's why RAID means redundant array of INEXPENSIVE disks! g

But the marketeers have changed it into Redundant Array of Independent Disks now.

Kurt Albershardt wrote:

Roger W. Norman wrote:
That's why RAID means redundant array of INEXPENSIVE disks! g

But the marketeers have changed it into Redundant Array of Independent Disks now.

Actually, I thought it started off as independent. Disk drives weren't inexpensive
when RAID first came out !


Graham

"Pooh Bear" wrote in message ...
Kurt Albershardt wrote:

Roger W. Norman wrote:
That's why RAID means redundant array of INEXPENSIVE disks! g

But the marketeers have changed it into Redundant Array of Independent Disks now.

Actually, I thought it started off as independent. Disk drives weren't inexpensive
when RAID first came out !

I heard it as "... Inexpensive Disks" in the 1980s when the concept was new.
Each component drive was very inexpensive compared to a mainframe drive.

"Pooh Bear" wrote in message

Kurt Albershardt wrote:

Roger W. Norman wrote:
That's why RAID means redundant array of INEXPENSIVE disks! g

But the marketeers have changed it into Redundant Array of
Independent Disks now.

Actually, I thought it started off as independent. Disk drives
weren't inexpensive when RAID first came out !

It started out as inexpensive, because the basis for the comparison was 14"
mainframe-type drives. I would guestimate that the nomenclature switch from
"inexpensive" to "independent" happened in the very early 1990s.

The original middle-1980s idea was to replace each 14" drive such as would
be sold by IBM or DEC for over $50,000, with however many 5" SCSI
workstation-type drives costing several $100's each.

Early adopters of this technology for mainframe applications were people
like EMC and Hitachi, both of which I saw operating in corporate mainframe
machine rooms around 1988.

The advocates of mainframe-type drives harped on the anvil-like reliability
of their drives as a justification for their vastly higher prices. In fact
the contemporaneous 5" SCSI drives weren't all that bad, but using them in
redundant arrays more than frosted the cake.

Arny Krueger wrote:

"Pooh Bear" wrote in message

Kurt Albershardt wrote:

Roger W. Norman wrote:
That's why RAID means redundant array of INEXPENSIVE disks! g

But the marketeers have changed it into Redundant Array of
Independent Disks now.

Actually, I thought it started off as independent. Disk drives
weren't inexpensive when RAID first came out !

It started out as inexpensive, because the basis for the comparison was 14"
mainframe-type drives. I would guestimate that the nomenclature switch from
"inexpensive" to "independent" happened in the very early 1990s.

The original middle-1980s idea was to replace each 14" drive such as would
be sold by IBM or DEC for over $50,000, with however many 5" SCSI
workstation-type drives costing several $100's each.

Early adopters of this technology for mainframe applications were people
like EMC and Hitachi, both of which I saw operating in corporate mainframe
machine rooms around 1988.

The advocates of mainframe-type drives harped on the anvil-like reliability
of their drives as a justification for their vastly higher prices. In fact
the contemporaneous 5" SCSI drives weren't all that bad, but using them in
redundant arrays more than frosted the cake.

5 1/4" SCSI drives weren't all *that* cheap back then.

I can still remember purchasing full height 5 1/4" 9 GB drives for about GBP
1400 ! For non-linear video editing.

Damn Micropolises. Every single one failed in time and the company folded.


Graham

In article ,
Pooh Bear wrote:

5 1/4" SCSI drives weren't all *that* cheap back then.

I can still remember purchasing full height 5 1/4" 9 GB drives for about GBP
1400 ! For non-linear video editing.

Damn Micropolises. Every single one failed in time and the company folded.

Got that right! In 1995, a Micropolis 1991AV cost me $3000 and lasted
all of 15 months. I had to buy another just to keep a spare around for
the required warranty RMAs. A nice 5400 RPM SCSI drive when it worked,
but the design was fundamentally flawed and they all died fairly quickly.

In the mid-late 80s, a Fujitsu Eagle gave you about 650MB, was 14" and
cost a bundle. They were fast enough for audio though!

The only couple of hundred dollar drives around were the Quantum 3.5"
drives, which were a bit slow and small for AV work (40, 80 and 100 MB
were common sizes).


Regards,

Monte McGuire

In article ,
Monte McGuire wrote:
In article ,
Pooh Bear wrote:

5 1/4" SCSI drives weren't all *that* cheap back then.

I can still remember purchasing full height 5 1/4" 9 GB drives for about GBP
1400 ! For non-linear video editing.

Damn Micropolises. Every single one failed in time and the company folded.

Got that right! In 1995, a Micropolis 1991AV cost me $3000 and lasted
all of 15 months. I had to buy another just to keep a spare around for
the required warranty RMAs. A nice 5400 RPM SCSI drive when it worked,
but the design was fundamentally flawed and they all died fairly quickly.

Yes, but Micropolis had made crap for years before the disaster with the
1991AV model. Yes, they were the first 9G drive out there, and yes, they
all blew up very quickly. But anybody who saw the Micropolis floppy systems
of the late 1970s should have got perfectly fair warning.

In the mid-late 80s, a Fujitsu Eagle gave you about 650MB, was 14" and
cost a bundle. They were fast enough for audio though!

The Eagles were nice, but I tended to like the CDC (later Imprimis) drives
because the front panel interface was a lot nicer. With the extended front
panel you do do seeks and examines by hand and deal with the bad block list
without having to take the drive offline.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."