The vendor that built the computer I use here at the office sold a new HDD to my company’s IT department, assured that it would not be a problem to install. It’s a 73 Gb SCSI that requires an onboard fan, and thus must be mounted in an externally accessible bay.
The machine’s external bays are currently filled with (1) fan-bearing 8 Gb HDD, (2) fan-bearing 37 Gb HDD, (3) 8mm Exabyte tape drive, (4) CD-R/RW drive, (5) CD-ROM drive and (6) 3½" floppy drive. There are no more external 5¼" bays.
That’s the part the vendor forgot when they assured our IT purchaser that there was room for the new drive. The motherboard that the machine was originally built around precluded mounting the floppy drive in the 3½" bay, so it was mounted in the lowest 5¼" bay. Since the HDDs all require their own cooling fan, there’s nothing that’s a candidate for reinstallation in an internal bay (heh - CD-ROM in an internal bay - if nothing else it would last forever).
Since nobody’s returning my calls (something to consider when purchasing extended service plans), I think I need to forge ahead on my own. My best plan right now is to open the case and see if the 3½" floppy can’t be crammed into its originally intended space - something I’ll have to geusstimate, as I’ll still need a mounting cage for it - in which case the new drive can go where the floppy is now. Failing that, I can remove the CD-ROM drive and use that bay for the new drive, although I hate to ditch the CD-ROM. The only other option I can think of is to replace the 8 Gb HDD with the new one, but that’s a bear as the 8 Gb is the boot drive and this is a mature W2K system (i.e., days to rebuild, in all likelihood).
I am just a little PO’d at both the lack of vendor support and our IT department’s “you figure it out” stance. You can buy a pretty nifty computer for less than they spent on this HDD.
Any chance of putting the new drive in an external enclosure?
You can have one of my old SCSI cables – all the Macs I have now have gone over to Firewire
Failing that, the CD-ROM is your most expendable item – the CD-R/RW should handle reading CD Roms. And if speed is an issue, you can upgrade it to one with a faster read.
Actually, I rate the floppy as Most Expendable. Make sure you have bootable CDs, etc. Given the tape drive, the CD drives and presumably a network connection, what are the chances that this machine will ever need to read or write to a floppy??
The tech support from the company that built the computer finally called back - they asked me to take a picture of the inside of the computer and send it to them!
Do you boot your server from a floppy often? If not I’d take it out and only hook it up only when you need it. Presumably your server would be down for maintenance anyway. If you need to access a floppy drive during normal operations you can share a floppy on another computer and access it over the network. Second choice would be the regular CD-ROM drive.
My advice would be, buy an external scsi disk tower… they come with buku cooling fans, a fairly beefy power supply, and you can just put one next to your current tower (or move it as far away as you can)… dump everything you can to that external tower (and if it’s far away as possible, you won’t hear all that disk noise)…
then you leave your system disk in the primary tower, as well as floppy, cdr, cdrw… you have all the functionality you want at your fingertips, and all the storage etc nearby… In the external scsi disk tower just set each of the scsi IDs to convenient numbers, cable all the disks to scsi cable coming out the back of your PC, and poof, problem solved (cost a few hundred bucks… I hope that’s reasonably possible)
Now here’s where it gets neat… When it’s time to expand, some of those scsi disk towers have a built in raid controller (well, the good ones do)… when you finally need that huge bank of storage, just buy a half dozen 73 scsi disks and run Raid 5 across all of them… you’ll get 365 gigs of storage with full data redundancy… it’s a good thing
aside: hey hun… now do you see why I want to do this? can I please spend a couple grand??? no? ok. [pout] Are you sure? yes? ok… [big pout]
I should not have said “full data redundancy”, that would be mirroring of all bits… what raid 5 actually does is use a portion of each disk for data integrity checking… if any of the one disks fails, all the data lost from the failed disk can be rebuilt from the bit checks on all other disks…
just figured I’d try to avoid being vague or incorrect on sdmb. (if you’d like more info, I can provide links and/or answer questions)
Since your HDDs aren’t linked in a type 5 RAID, my suggestion is to dump all the data on the smallest one to the biggest one. You can make some temporary room if you must.
