Decommissioning old hard drives (2)

[Tannin]

Sob.

I pulled the pin on my glorious collection of early model SCSI drives today.

Seagate Cheetah 1. 4.5GB. 10,033 RPM. The first 10,000 RPM drive ever made. Cost me $2500. Close to six years, 24 x 7, been in my home system, the accounts server, the technical server, and finally banished to the showroom. Never missed a beat.

IBM Ultrastar Z15. 9.1GB. Second 10,000 RPM drive ever made. Worth over $2000 when I bought it, but it was a refurb and I picked it up for just under a grand. Possibly the only drive that's even louder than a Cheetah 1. And runs hotter. It's done five years solid: 24 x 7, never once let me down.

IBM Ultrastar 9ES. 9.1GB. An "entry level" 7200 RPM SCSI drive that, with 170Mbit/sec DTR and 7.5ms seek times blitzed quite a few high-end products in its day. Picked this one up second-hand, ex-government. Would have cost them $800 or so. I've had it for about thee years, maybe four. And of course, it ran 24 x 7.

IBM Ultrastar 9ES. 9.1GB. A twin to the other one. Got it at the same time.

FIC VA-503+. World's best selling motherboard for 9 months straight. The first Super 7 motherboard in the world and - incredibly - the last one to go out of production. Our best selling board for almost 4 years. A true grand master.

AMD K6-III/450+. Greatest business CPU ever made (bar for the 386DX/40, of course). Been running for three years straight, 24 x 7, overclocked to 570MHz with stock cooling. Solid as granite.

All gone.

sigh.

Replaced by a boring new Bliss midi-tower, a Soltek SL-75DRV-5 KT-333 that came in brand new the other day as an RMA replacement, the last 0.13 micron Athlon XP 1700, and a Samsung 40GB 7200 IDE drive worth $138 plus tax.

I know how you feel, Handruin.


Sob.

 

[Mercutio]

I've got a worse decision forthcoming:

I have an IBM external RAID array with 10 4.3GB Barracudas in it. SCA drives, all, and everything is hotswappable. The cabinet only does U2W SCSI and for all that I only get 36GB of disk space.

A prime piece of technology, worth a small fortune.

Of course, I can hear those drives while I'm in the shower, which really does say something, and I've been decommissioning 40GB drives lately in favor of 120GBs, so it's REALLY hard to justify keeping 40GB in a 4U cabinet.

I imagine that will be as tough as saying goodbye to $2000 worth of SCSI drives.

 

[Tannin]

I know exactly how you feel, Merc. I guess my question is, what am I going to do with those drives? I have to spin them up from time to time, otherwise they will freeze up in me, and I have plenty of machines that only need a couple of GB to boot off and access the network from, but they are too damn loud to put up with any longer.

It would be a crying shame to just let them rust away, I already took pictures of them. Short of ear plugs, I don't know what to do.

And that 4 x box of yours. It's the same deal. Rationally, you can't justify keeping it for anything. It probably doesn't make a good doorstop. But unplugging it is going to feel like taking your 14 year old dog to the vet to be put down.

It's better with people. At least with people you can just bury them and know that, before too long, they will be returning goodness to the soil. With hard drives, you can't even do that.

Melt them down and turn them into Stealth Fighters?

 

[Tea]

Juzt an interezting little PZ to that. Tannin tanzferred the data over yezterday after work. Or ztarted to. Hiz uzual habit with the office machinez, which moztly have 2 or 3 phyzical drivez and multiple partitionz, iz to hook the new drivez in on the network zomewhere and then ztart az many command line windowz az are required to XCOPY everything over.

(Yez, with OZ/2, XCOPY workz. Fazt and zimple.)

Naturally, he expectz that the zyztemz will remain rezponzive at the dezktop while the data tranzferz. (Zomething that Windowz juzt can't do, even 2000 zlowz down zignificantly once you get two or three bulk copiez going. Tannin findz it runz a little fazter if he doez one partition at a time, but uzually, for convenience, he juzt starz them all off at the zame time and leavez the zystem to do itz thing. The extra time required to do zeveral zimultaneouz XCOPYz - azking the poor little read-write headz to fly about all over the place inztead of doing the whole thing in order - iz not great.

But thiz time, he did the firzt 9GB partition in 10 or 15 minutes (essentially the time it took to squeeze all that data over the network cable), then ztarted the zecond two at the zame time.

And it took forever! Like maybe five timez zlower than doing them one at a time.

The difference, of courze, waz the lack of ZCZI. The Zamzung IDE juzt doezn't cut it for that kind of work. Zure, only one zpindle, and higher zeek time than the old ten thouzandz, but it waz a truly mazzive difference.

In ordinary uze, the IDE drive doez juzt fine. Cookz along very nicely. And I can hear myzelf think.

 

[CityK]

my question is, what am I going to do with those drives?

Donate them to the Ballarat Museum of Technology.

No such place? No problem, start one. You da man Tannin, you da man.


CK

 

[Jake the Dog]

sounds like Sovereign Hill is the place for them Tannin

 

[Howell]

sounds like Sovereign Hill is the place for them Tannin

I like the music on their about page. Is this Australian?

 

[Tannin]

Soverign Hill is 2 blocks from my place. Soverign Hill is on one side of the creek, the hill on the other side of the creek is called Red Hill.

 

[mubs]

Merc wrote:

Of course, I can hear those drives while I'm in the shower,

And in another thread, he wrote that he has 60+ drives in use at his place.

Merc, seriously, you might dmagae your hearing. Another 10 years of this, would be very, very bad. You have to do something about it.

 

[James]

Please someone point out to Tea where the "s" key is.

 

[Buck]

Please someone point out to Tea where the "s" key is.

I thought she was using the "S" key. I must have an optic nerve translating something incorrectly.

 

[Mercutio]

And in another thread, he wrote that he has 60+ drives in use at his place.

Merc, seriously, you might dmagae your hearing. Another 10 years of this, would be very, very bad. You have to do something about it.

Yes but they're almost all quiet little Maxtors and Samsungs, not SCSI Barracudas.

Anyway, I just finished fixing this little problem. Here's a description of the finished product.

The rest of that topic at slashdot is pretty interesting, too.

 

[mubs]

That was interesting reading, thanks! How'd you do the CAT 5 cabling in-wall? Used a fishtape? Didn't any studs get in the way? How do you keep the things that are in the closet cool?

 

[Mercutio]

The longest run (12 cables, 20 - 35 feet) was in a wall with removable wood(like) paneling. That was really easy. I popped off the panels and bored the studs.

I had access to the wall my closet was on, with those panels off, so I also bored those studs and used a long fiberglass rod (cable pusher) and a cable fish to move my cables to precut holes just above the shelf in my closet (ie, unless you're 6'6", you wouldn't see the jacks). I also cut another plate in the hallway along my run (the hall and the closet share a wall), which gave me a place to plug in the wireless AP I bought a few weeks ago, and a wall-mount phone. That jack will be visible when I move out. TS for them. My wiring is better than theirs was anyway.

The jacks in the bedrooms were a little harder. There I didn't have any easy way to cross the space between the far wall and the closet without going into the floor or the ceiling, so, after verifying that the cable run behind those wall plates led into the utliity room (where the wiring closet for my building is) beneath my apartment, I did the simplest things and dropped my wires down there.

The rest of this story involves at least one felony (I'm not particularly worried that they'll find my wires, given the rat's nest of crap around their own wiring), since I had to get access to the utility room to do anything with my wires, but I was INCREDIBLY lucky that it and the adjoining laundry room had tile ceilings, and three more holes later, I pushed my last 8 cables up behind my closet, where another couple of 'plates awaited it.

Net result? 24 100Mbit ports, in wall. Other than some minor drywall damage in my bedroom, it's a very good job if I do say so myself. I did it over the course of a weekend.

Cooling my closet isn't that big a deal, surprisingly. There's an indoor/outdoor thermometer stuck on the outside of the closet, and the "coolest room in my apartment" (due to open window/permanent AC) usually reads about 10 degrees below the termperature elsewhere inside, and the closet maybe 5 degrees warmer (e.g. 80 if the indoor temp is around 75 and the temp in that room is 65). It's well within tolerance for all the hardware.

I *did* find that I can't put the clear plastic (lexan?) sides or door on my rack, or run its integral cooler in an enclosed space. There's nowhere for the heat to go.

 

[mubs]

You sure are an enterprising guy, Merc.........

 

[Mercutio]

What?

I've done ethernet installations before. It's absolutely my least-favorite way to make money, but I've done it, and what I did beat the heck out of bundled cables everywhere in my apartment.

The high-end hardware I have is all castoff stuff. I picked up the rack and the RAID array (and a really-nice at the time IBM 4-way PPro server) from the dumpster at an Exodus NOC at the height of the .com boom (literally, the customer didn't pay, so they cleared out their cage and threw the stuff away).

The router I bought at an auction for a bankrupt ISP. I had wanted a nice, big Sun box to play with, but that particular company was using Compaq hardware, so I bought the Catalyst instead. I paid about $900 for it, which isn't bad considering that it's a full chassis with the extra power supply and everything.

 

[Dïscfärm]

Don't apartments normally have lease agreements with stipulations about their use as well as premise modifications?

 

[Mercutio]

Yes, and at one point I had a neighbor who used his apartment to deal rock. He had a REALLY obvious steel door and frame put in, and it's still there, two tenents later.

Somehow I'm not worried about my little wires.