Santilli said:
...Since I'm booting off the array, and I'm not sure if I want to give that up, just yet, I don't think I really need to quickly remove the 4 drive raid array.
Well, there goes 4 empty bays for fixed drives!
So, if you were presumably using the Supermicro SC-941 chassis we’ve been talking about (which can be setup either as a pedestal case or a rack-mountable case), you would then have 4-each 5¼-inch drive slots available once you mounted your 4-each fixed X-15 drives into the 5¼-inch drive slots (5¼-inch drive slot #9 would stay as floppy drive + USB front panel). After that, if you add an SCA mobile rack, you will then be down to just 1-each available 5¼-inch drive slot. If you go in this direction, you will need to have either 1-each DVD reader/writer
or 1-each CD reader/writer acting as a bootable CD reader.
The other possibility is that after you mount all 4 of your X-15 drives, you add all 4 of your optical drives. You would then have
no available 5¼ drive bays.
I was thinking an SCA/scsi setup would allow me to buy a number of scsi drives, cheaply, and plug them into the system for daily, or weekly backups, and remove them for safety.
You’re onto the right idea here about using inexpensive hard drives for doing fast large capacity backups, but an SCA / SCSI solution is not an inexpensive way to do this. It’s no secret that ATA or SATA hard drive technologies will beat the pants off any form of SCSI when it comes to the most storage capacity per peso spent. SCSI technologies simply don’t match up well for such a utilitarian task (occasional use, sitting around offline 99.9% of the time, inexpensive, etc). SCSI would provide poor return on investment (ROI) compared to ATA or SATA technologies. So, ATA or SATA is the best technology for this job.
But, there’s still a problem using raw ATA or SCSI drives for doing backups. You are stuck with having to plug in the drive, booting (or rebooting) the computer so that the SCSI or ATA system BIOS will recognise the “new” hard drive and allow your operating system to mount the drive volume before you can copy off files to the plugged-in hard drives. The same routine will have to be followed for dismounting the drives safely (shutdown system or reboot, remove drive before POST).
Currently, the best “affordable” way to do true plug’n’play disc-to-disc backups with is to use a hard drive installed in a Firewire or USB (if USB, preferably “High Speed” USB2). Firewire is faster than USB2. With either USB or Firewire drive, you can plug in a drive at any time, perform the backup, and remove the drive without having to worry about fiddling about with rebooting just to *safely* mount and dismount a hard drive. You could also use an advanced hardware RAID controller -- setup to support your hard drives as JBOD -- with full hot-swap / hot-plug services to do the same thing with SCSI or ATA/SATA drives, but that’s going to be more expensive than going with a self-contained external Firewire hard drive.
Further, an external 5¼-inch Firewire housing can be setup with removable drive bays. With removable ATA drive bays, you can use a single external Firewire drive housing but also plug in various ATA hard drives pre-mounted in ATA drive bays as needed instead of having each ATA hard drive in a separate closed Firewire drive housing (more expensive).
Another possibility is to use Granite Digitals' removeable firewire external drive setups, using ide drives, as you suggest, but, when you start costing it out, it starts getting very expensive.
If you don’t care about the true hot-swap hot-plug (plug’n’play) you get from Firewire or USB, need to have 2 or more hard drive available for use at one time, and just need the ability to plug a boot drive and/or multiple data drives in before you turn the computer on, then a SATA / SCA or SCSI / SCA backplane (a.k.a. -- “mobile drive rack”) is definitely the least expensive way of achieving this capability, as individual hard drives in separate Firewire housings would easily exceed the US$180 or $160 cost of a Supermicro CSE-M35 (5-drive) or CSE-M34 (4-drive) mobile drive rack.
I'm wondering if a tower with backplane setup is cheaper, or SATA will be cheaper, but still provide a superior interface.
In the “here and now” -- as opposed to 8 ~ 12 months from now -- about $160 will give you a 4-drive SATA plug-in capability, a bit more for parallel SCA SCSI . Approximately 8 ~ 12 months from now, when SAS finally debuts, that would be the hands down choice since you could plug SAS or SATA drives into the same 4-bay (or 5-bay) mobile drive rack -- both of which only occupy 3-each 5¼-inch drive slots in the chassis.
Is it possible to use a firewire external drive, and swap files between mac os extended, and ntfs?
Yes, but there aren’t any OSX file system drivers for Win2K / WinXP (that I know of) nor vice versa. So, your only choice for a common hard drive file system, for transferring large amounts of data back and forth between OSX and Win NT/2K/XP, is to simply use the well-understood DOS FAT32 file system.
As for the drives, I've got one ide, 56 x Lite-on,that's neccessary to boot from if you have problems with the array, or startup disk. Can't put that in a firewire enclosure.
An ATAPI 52x32x52 LiteON CD-R/W (LTR-5237) will work just as good as your existing ATAPI LiteON CD-ROM reader for booting up on a CD-ROM, not to mention it can write to CD-R and CD-R/W media, and can be bought for a measly $40. In my opinion, it’s easily the best budget CD-R/W around. With a single LiteON 52x CD-R/W mounted fixed in one of the chassis’ 5¼-inch drive slots, you’ll have both your bootable CD reader and your CD writer, thus saving a precious 5¼-inch drive slot. Or, probably even better yet, you can install a Pioneer DVR-105 DVD-R/W and have CD-ROM booting capability, as well as CD and DVD-R writing capabilities. The Pioneer DVR-105 (and the older DVR-104) are really excellent writers. Cost: about US$160. (Note that the Pioneer DVR-A05 and DVR-105 models are the same drives.)
Also one DVD reader, Pioneer, Scsi, which, when used with a DVD/external writer, in the near future, would allow burning DVD's and backups. It's Scsi, as are the plextor 40X UltraPlexCD reader, and, a 32x Plextor scsi CD-r writer, Currently I have the ide, CD reader scsi, and ide installed, with an external firewire CD-RW,Liteon, for backups, etc. I'd really like to be able to just mount them all in the case, since they coexist well, on the scsi card.
I want to make sure what your current optical drive inventory is. Is it ??? :
- 1-each LiteON 56X ATAPI CD Reader
- 1-each Plextor 32X SCSI CD-R/W
- 1-each Plextor 40X SCSI CD Reader
- 1-each Pioneer SCSI DVD reader
- 1-each LiteON External Firewire CD-R/W
If this is correct, and you *definitely* intend on keeping all those SCSI drives for a few more years, then you would likely be best off to purchase an external 4-bay SCSI desktop drive tower and attach it to an external SCSI channel.
A trick that I’ve done in a pinch has been to use an empty mini-tower computer chassis (with power supply still inside) as an SCSI drive tower. The SCSI drives are mounted into the chassis as usual, but a SCSI cable goes from the back of the host computer over inside the mini-tower computer chassis. It’s ugly, but it works.
Otherwise, I believe a 3-bay or 4-bay external SCSI drive tower and 40 ~ 60 watt power supply, with front accessible 5¼-inch drive slots, go for around US$160 ~ $240. Undoubtedly, there are likely nowadays plenty of used ones available.
So, to answer your question about drive slots:
I would like 5 drive slots for peripherals. I'd like to pick up a DVD writer, and, another possibility is a hotswapable firewire enclosure, with removeable drives:
like this:
http://www.granitedigital.com/
However, if you look at the prices, I'm not sure a backplane sca/scsi setup isnt' cheaper.
At approximately US$160 ~ $180 for a capacity of 4- or 5-each hard drives, a Supermicro SCA mobile rack is definitely less expensive than 4- or 5-each Granite Digital Firewire drive bays, and either one of these SCA mobile racks occupies only 3-each 5¼-inch drive slots in the chassis.
http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg29_firewireidesmartlcdcasekits.htm
SO...
Summing it up, if you had to do it all today, I would use a Supermicro SC-941 chassis, install your 4-each X-15 hard drives as fixed (non removable), add a new (ATAPI) Pioneer DVR-105 as a boot drive and decide what you want to do with the remaining 3-each 5¼-inch drive slots that would be left. You might consider adding the DVD reader and one ATA drive bay ($40) for removable cheap-o conventional parallel ATA hard drives, or as an alternative, a SCSI drive bay ($65) for removable non-SCA SCSI hard drives.
I don’t know what you have in inventory as far as “spare” parallel ATA hard drives and/or wide (LVD or SE) SCSI hard drives. Do you have a pile ATA hard drives that aren’t any older than about 1999 vintage, or maybe a pile of “older” wide SCSI (D68 connector, SE or LVD) hard drives?
, new mobo designs with PCI Express (probably for both 130nm and 90nm Opteron), and new faster memory (533 MHz or 666 MHz DDR memory channels). 
