Cluster & Hard-Drives

[Charles Steinkuehler]

OK, I'm going through some of my accumulated PC parts in preperation for
the great Cluster Construction Project, and I have come up with the
following HDD's that I can part with:

1.6 Gig ATA:
2x WD Caviar 21600 (WDAC21600-00H)

1.2Gig ATA:
1x Quantum Fireball 1280AT (FB12A101 Rev 01)

3.2 Gig ATA:
1x Seagate Medalist 3210 (ST33218A)

That makes 4 HDD's to go with my 5 HP machines...hopefully someone else
will have a spare HDD.

In addition to the IDE stuff, I have the makings of an almost decent
server HDD RAID sub-system, if anyone's got a case/power-supply for the
beast.  I have 22 (yes, that's TWENTY-TWO) DCHS 4Gig IBM SCSI drives
(half-height 3-1/2").  All are fast-wide (68 pin connector), and most
are ultra (40 MB/s bus speed).  Three are even mounted in IBM removable
HDD carries from the old RAID system they probably came from.

To go along with this collection, I have several original IBM ServeRAID
controller cards.  These have 3 SCSI-Wide channels (non-ultra...20 MB/s
each channel) on a hardware-RAID controller that includes an embedded
PowerPC.  This controller card works quite well with linux, and I still
have some of these systems in production (saddly, my employer thinks
spending a few hundred dollars on modern HDD's is a waste of money, so
1/2 my servers are running HDD's and RAID controllers bought used from
CompGeeks...at least they're finally replacing the batteries in the
UPS's after 6 months of power-outage caused re-boots <sigh>).  The
drivers for the IBM ServeRAID are in all recent kernels (since mid 2.2
series), and installs work "out of the box" with RedHat (no wierd driver
disks required), and I'd presume other disto's (although I've only
tested RedHat personally).

Anyway, I've kept these SCSI drives around thinking I would use them
sometime, but I don't have the case (or the ambition) to mount all these
drives, and I've recently come into several higher-end SCSI drives (9
and 18 Gig).   So with the probability of building my dream home video
server with these drives near zero, I'm offering them up for the cluster
project.  Should make a pretty good database or file-server, with all
those spindles and Hardware-RAID!

Let me know how much of this stuff would be useful for the Cluster
Project, and I'll bring it to the RH event in Lawrence.

Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net

P.S.  WARNING:  All of this stuff used to work, but it hasn't been
tested in a while.  Caveat Emptor.  All sales are final...NO REFUNDS!
:-)

P.P.S.  I also have a bunch (8) of 2 Gig IBM full-height 3-1/2"
SCSI-narrow (50 pin) drives, if anyone has some spare SCSI controllers
for the Cluster systems.  These are spares from my 486 web-server
project, which was running a VLB SCSI controller (remember the days
before PCI?  Gotta love those IRQ & DMA conflicts!).  The HP Vectra's
have on-board IDE controllers, but no SCSI (like that's a suprise).