SCSI disks in this day and age?

[LoadWB]

I've found SCSI drives in surplus Mac and Sun stuff from the Amiga era.

Yup.  That's where I found my IBM 18GB 50-pin drive.  I used that on my WarpEngine.  When I upgraded to a CyberStorm I replaced it with an 18GB 68-pin and now the narrow drive is in a Sun 211 box attached to my 2000's Blizzard 2060.

[LoadWB]

The 4 drives I scrunged for myself yesterday are making me uncertain: They have no power plug. Is this some low-voltage or other standard that gets power from the bus connector? Will it work with my old controller?

Does it look like this?


If so, then it's an SCA interface which has all the data an power lines in one interface and you will need an adapter to connect it to your computer.

[LoadWB]

Well the SCA drive will be so much faster than any Amiga SCSI interface that it will be waiting for the interface to catch up. To the best of my knowledge, the Phase 5 SCSI interface (NEC 53C770) on a 68-pin bus is about the fastest Amiga interface there is, and now the HDD's are as inexpensive or less than their CF counter-parts. I have backups on both, but now the HDDs coming out of service with their servers are as cheap to buy as potato chips.

I have colleagues who know I still work a lot with SCSI just bring me their old server drives.  I wipe them and check them for errors.  I haven't yet had a single one with errors.  I have a multitude of sizes hanging around right now which I will soon be making available.  Sadly, the last time I had a bunch of SCSI drives I literally couldn't GIVE them away -- no one would take them!  They wound up in the dump.  I'm hoping this time I'll have better luck getting them into the hands of people who will use them.

[LoadWB]

Electricity is high, and going up all the time.  I have 3 servers that run 24/7.  My electric bill isn't too bad, though.

I have my workstation with five hard drives (RAID-1 and RAID-5) which puts out a good bit of heat, an old AMD K6-3+ Solaris server which puts out a fair bit of heat mostly from the AT power supply, and an old customer server I'm co-locating for a while.  They don't consume a lot of electricity, but between the three of them and their associated UPSs running constantly my computer room stays around 82F - 85F.  I'm working to consolidate that some, though.