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| Author |
Message |
Darren Harris
Guest
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 Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2003 8:45 am Post subject: Help: Building A System Around Seagate Drives |
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I'd like to build two systems around 8 SCSI drives that I am about to
get. Each system will have four drives.(See below).
http://www.softwareandstuff.com/h_strg_seast118723lc.html
http://www.softwareandstuff.com/hd_st118202lc.html
Reliability is important, and performance is secondary.(I intend to
back up between drives).
Besides SCA 80-pin to 68-pin adaptors, and an LVD SCSI controller, are
there any special considerations for a motherboard?(And anything else
I may have fail to mention).
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks a lot.
Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York. |
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Don_B
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2003 8:58 am Post subject: Re: Building A System Around Seagate Drives |
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I'm not familiar with an LVD SCSI controller, but if reliability is
important, why don't you get a controller that can handle RAID 1, which is
mirrored drives? |
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Overlord
Guest
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| Posted: Sat Dec 20, 2003 6:54 am Post subject: Re: Help: Building A System Around Seagate Drives |
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First don't know why the model number at the end of the first link is a garbled version of the
actual drive model.
You might mix and match the drives using the 10k drives as C and D drive with the page file
on the second drive, and 2 of the 7200rpm drives as storage.
10K drives run pretty hot and fan cooling is recommended. I run 15k drives and they run hotter
but they are quieter than my 10k drives. You can jumper the drives to spin up sequentially as
the interface card tells them to, to prevent any sudden current drain on the system. You can do
that with jumpers on the drives or in the controller card bios.
LVD drives cannot be terminated by jumpers on the drive. You will need a terminator on the last
connector of the SCSI cable. It'll cost you a connector so for all 4 drives you'll need a cable
with 6 connectors on it; one end connected to the card and the terminator on the far end after the
drives. There are specific rules regarding the spacing of drive stubs/connectors
on SCSI cables. Most decent pre-made cables should do fine. I like the teflon cables myself.
I don't recall if you are supposed to have twisted pair cables but for U2W 80meg drives you should
be alright with the old flat cables. I used to make my own 50pin SCSI cables but crimping on the
68pin connectors can be a ***.
You can probably get an Adaptec AHA-2940U2W card for fairly cheap.
Just about Any SCSI card will run any SCSI drive (except HVD) but not necessarily at the top speed
of the drives. If you find a cheap U160 controller, it'll run the drives fine and give you some
headroom for future upgrading.
I've run SCSI I, SCSIUW, SCSI U160, 7200/10K/15K drives, SCSI CD and CDRW, on MSI, Gigabyte,
Asus, ECS, and probably a few other brand MB with no problems. It's pretty much a nonissue
unless you're going with a MB with onboard SCSI.
Since you're going for reliability you probably won't be OCing any time soon. That's good as
getting too far from the basic PCI frequencies has a tendancy to irritate SCSI cards.
If it's ever going to be a consideration, get a MB that you can lock the PCI/AGP freqs.
Drives are ordered by what ID they are jumpered to. No ID jumpers makes the drive ID 0.
The first jumper gives it a value of 1; second gives a value of 2; third jumper gives a value of 4;
4th jumper gives a value of 8. Thus is you jumper the first and third jumpers you have 4 + 1 = ID 5
SCSI card is generally defaulted to ID 7.
If you like different OSs, you can load at least one OS on each drive. Going into the SCSI bios
during post, you can tell it to boot from which ever drive you like.
Went from double spaced 10meg MFM drives to an enormous 1gig SCSI drive. Never owned an IDE
until a company sent me 2 1gig IDEs by mistake. I put them in my 6 year old son's system.
I've since upgraded him to SCSI so he can run my older drives for more storage.
Only 6 year old I know that dual boots 2K and Linux.....
On 18 Dec 2003 18:45:45 -0800, Searcher7@mail.con2.com (Darren Harris) wrote:
| Quote: | I'd like to build two systems around 8 SCSI drives that I am about to
get. Each system will have four drives.(See below).
http://www.softwareandstuff.com/h_strg_seast118723lc.html
http://www.softwareandstuff.com/hd_st118202lc.html
Reliability is important, and performance is secondary.(I intend to
back up between drives).
Besides SCA 80-pin to 68-pin adaptors, and an LVD SCSI controller, are
there any special considerations for a motherboard?(And anything else
I may have fail to mention).
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks a lot.
Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.
|
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Darren Harris
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2003 7:12 am Post subject: Re: Help: Building A System Around Seagate Drives |
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kurt_SPAMLESS@hotmail.com (Overlord) wrote in message news:<3fe39510.165858640@news.central.cox.net>...
| Quote: | First don't know why the model number at the end of the first link is a garbled version of the
actual drive model.
You might mix and match the drives using the 10k drives as C and D drive with the page file
on the second drive, and 2 of the 7200rpm drives as storage.
10K drives run pretty hot and fan cooling is recommended. I run 15k drives and they run hotter
but they are quieter than my 10k drives. You can jumper the drives to spin up sequentially as
the interface card tells them to, to prevent any sudden current drain on the system. You can do
that with jumpers on the drives or in the controller card bios.
|
I don't know what you mean by "page file", but I want the option of
booting from "C" or "D" and also the option of mirroring them to the
second two drives. I'll use an external(USB?) to mirror the OS(with
basic apps installed) back to "C" or "D" if anything major goes wrong.
Also, I don't know what kind of fans I'll need, but I do have a large
27 inch ATX case that I would like to use with this project.
And it would really be nice to be able to power down or power up any
of one to three out of four drives when the system is on(and still
have Windows find them).
| Quote: | LVD drives cannot be terminated by jumpers on the drive. You will need a terminator on the last
connector of the SCSI cable. It'll cost you a connector so for all 4 drives you'll need a cable
with 6 connectors on it; one end connected to the card and the terminator on the far end after the
drives. There are specific rules regarding the spacing of drive stubs/connectors
on SCSI cables. Most decent pre-made cables should do fine. I like the teflon cables myself.
I don't recall if you are supposed to have twisted pair cables but for U2W 80meg drives you should
be alright with the old flat cables. I used to make my own 50pin SCSI cables but crimping on the
68pin connectors can be a ***.
You can probably get an Adaptec AHA-2940U2W card for fairly cheap.
Just about Any SCSI card will run any SCSI drive (except HVD) but not necessarily at the top speed
of the drives. If you find a cheap U160 controller, it'll run the drives fine and give you some
headroom for future upgrading.
|
I do have some hardware lying around. I have a SCSI RAID Micropolis
Radion case with three drive bays and a couple of RAID cards. A HP
Netraid D4943-69002 3 channel controller, and a COMPAQ 194754-001
Smart 2/P Raid Array Controller PCI. But I'm RAID-ignorant and really
don't know if any of this hardware fits in with my plan or even works
with these LVD drives.
| Quote: | I've run SCSI I, SCSIUW, SCSI U160, 7200/10K/15K drives, SCSI CD and CDRW, on MSI, Gigabyte,
Asus, ECS, and probably a few other brand MB with no problems. It's pretty much a nonissue
unless you're going with a MB with onboard SCSI.
Since you're going for reliability you probably won't be OCing any time soon. That's good as
getting too far from the basic PCI frequencies has a tendancy to irritate SCSI cards.
If it's ever going to be a consideration, get a MB that you can lock the PCI/AGP freqs.
Drives are ordered by what ID they are jumpered to. No ID jumpers makes the drive ID 0.
The first jumper gives it a value of 1; second gives a value of 2; third jumper gives a value of 4;
4th jumper gives a value of 8. Thus is you jumper the first and third jumpers you have 4 + 1 = ID 5
SCSI card is generally defaulted to ID 7.
If you like different OSs, you can load at least one OS on each drive. Going into the SCSI bios
during post, you can tell it to boot from which ever drive you like.
|
I can see I'll have a lot of studying to do. :-)
As far as a motherboard, I'll go with whatever is cheap, but works. As
for overclocking, if in the future I ever do anything like that, I'd
just copy someone elses successful hardware configuration, because
there are just too many variables and things that I don't know, go
wrong, or just won't work. But that won't be an issue because my next
system will be optimized for 64bit, so that'll be all new hardware.
:-)
| Quote: | Went from double spaced 10meg MFM drives to an enormous 1gig SCSI drive. Never owned an IDE
until a company sent me 2 1gig IDEs by mistake. I put them in my 6 year old son's system.
I've since upgraded him to SCSI so he can run my older drives for more storage.
Only 6 year old I know that dual boots 2K and Linux.....
|
I can't even figure out Windows 98. :-)
Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York. |
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Overlord
Guest
|
| Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2003 10:26 am Post subject: Re: Help: Building A System Around Seagate Drives |
|
|
On 20 Dec 2003 17:12:56 -0800, Searcher7@mail.con2.com (Darren Harris) wrote:
| Quote: | kurt_SPAMLESS@hotmail.com (Overlord) wrote in message news:<3fe39510.165858640@news.central.cox.net>...
First don't know why the model number at the end of the first link is a garbled version of the
actual drive model.
You might mix and match the drives using the 10k drives as C and D drive with the page file
on the second drive, and 2 of the 7200rpm drives as storage.
10K drives run pretty hot and fan cooling is recommended. I run 15k drives and they run hotter
but they are quieter than my 10k drives. You can jumper the drives to spin up sequentially as
the interface card tells them to, to prevent any sudden current drain on the system. You can do
that with jumpers on the drives or in the controller card bios.
I don't know what you mean by "page file", but I want the option of
booting from "C" or "D" and also the option of mirroring them to the
second two drives. I'll use an external(USB?) to mirror the OS(with
basic apps installed) back to "C" or "D" if anything major goes wrong.
Sorry, in 2K, and possibly in XP the page file is what used to be called the swapfile. |
Changing the boot drive in the scsi bios only takes like 5-10 seconds during post.
I can boot from J drive if I like but that's actually a storage drive on my system and not currently
with it's own OS on it. I have an Installs directory on the drive with copies of the installation
files of just about every util/browser/shell extension/MP3 player/prog on the system.
A plain vanilla SCSI card won't hardware mirror tho it can be done in software.
I used to keep a mirror image of my C drive on another drive. If 2K ever went south badly enough
not to boot, I would just boot from the backup drive.
| Quote: | Also, I don't know what kind of fans I'll need, but I do have a large
27 inch ATX case that I would like to use with this project.
Bay cooler fans to keep the drives cooler and less prone to failure. |
I have a massive black real tower case. Don't recall how tall it is but it's just a little taller
than my desk.
Right now the sides are off my case but it's set up to blow out the back of the case more air than
it blows in the front. Thus it sucks external air in thru the vented bezels over the drives.
| Quote: | And it would really be nice to be able to power down or power up any
of one to three out of four drives when the system is on(and still
have Windows find them).
All my drives spin down after like 15 minutes of no use. I used to use Adaptec's EZ-SCSI to do it |
but I believe you're not supposed to use that in 2K, dunno. In any case the standard power
management controls it. Clicking on a link or drive in Windows Explorer will spin up the specific
drive on demand. Occasionally I can browse a drive in WE for a while and it'll give me the drive
contents that are cached. I can go where I want to and the drive won't spin up until I
copy/access/etc files on that drive. Good for me because I'm running like 8 actual hard drives and
I don't want them all spinning up when I just need to use one.
| Quote: | LVD drives cannot be terminated by jumpers on the drive. You will need a terminator on the last
connector of the SCSI cable. It'll cost you a connector so for all 4 drives you'll need a cable
with 6 connectors on it; one end connected to the card and the terminator on the far end after the
drives. There are specific rules regarding the spacing of drive stubs/connectors
on SCSI cables. Most decent pre-made cables should do fine. I like the teflon cables myself.
I don't recall if you are supposed to have twisted pair cables but for U2W 80meg drives you should
be alright with the old flat cables. I used to make my own 50pin SCSI cables but crimping on the
68pin connectors can be a ***.
You can probably get an Adaptec AHA-2940U2W card for fairly cheap.
Just about Any SCSI card will run any SCSI drive (except HVD) but not necessarily at the top speed
of the drives. If you find a cheap U160 controller, it'll run the drives fine and give you some
headroom for future upgrading.
I do have some hardware lying around. I have a SCSI RAID Micropolis
Radion case with three drive bays and a couple of RAID cards. A HP
Netraid D4943-69002 3 channel controller, and a COMPAQ 194754-001
Smart 2/P Raid Array Controller PCI. But I'm RAID-ignorant and really
don't know if any of this hardware fits in with my plan or even works
with these LVD drives.
Don't know the specs on the controllers offhand. The thing to remember tho is that the best drives |
aren't going to sustain external data transfers over 70meg/sec and probably far less.
If your drives sustain 30meg/sec then 2 properly striped drives could be said to dump 60meg/sec into
the raid controller. Getting a bunch of the fastest drives around and the fastest controller to run
them on is still going to bottleneck running on a 32/33 PCI slot.
| Quote: | I've run SCSI I, SCSIUW, SCSI U160, 7200/10K/15K drives, SCSI CD and CDRW, on MSI, Gigabyte,
Asus, ECS, and probably a few other brand MB with no problems. It's pretty much a nonissue
unless you're going with a MB with onboard SCSI.
Since you're going for reliability you probably won't be OCing any time soon. That's good as
getting too far from the basic PCI frequencies has a tendancy to irritate SCSI cards.
If it's ever going to be a consideration, get a MB that you can lock the PCI/AGP freqs.
Drives are ordered by what ID they are jumpered to. No ID jumpers makes the drive ID 0.
The first jumper gives it a value of 1; second gives a value of 2; third jumper gives a value of 4;
4th jumper gives a value of 8. Thus is you jumper the first and third jumpers you have 4 + 1 = ID 5
SCSI card is generally defaulted to ID 7.
If you like different OSs, you can load at least one OS on each drive. Going into the SCSI bios
during post, you can tell it to boot from which ever drive you like.
I can see I'll have a lot of studying to do. :-)
That part is easy. The ID jumpers are bit mapped like the old S registers in Hayes compatible |
modems except it's even easier because the jumpers have binary values.
| Quote: | As far as a motherboard, I'll go with whatever is cheap, but works. As
for overclocking, if in the future I ever do anything like that, I'd
just copy someone elses successful hardware configuration, because
there are just too many variables and things that I don't know, go
wrong, or just won't work. But that won't be an issue because my next
system will be optimized for 64bit, so that'll be all new hardware.
:-)
Went from double spaced 10meg MFM drives to an enormous 1gig SCSI drive. Never owned an IDE
until a company sent me 2 1gig IDEs by mistake. I put them in my 6 year old son's system.
I've since upgraded him to SCSI so he can run my older drives for more storage.
Only 6 year old I know that dual boots 2K and Linux.....
I can't even figure out Windows 98. :-)
Knoppix version of Linux. Boots from a burned CD image, detects everything in the system, loads |
it's own drivers for everything from onboard sound to NICs, configures itself, and lets him surf the
internet if he wants. Actually he just boots it for some of the games on the CD....
| Quote: | Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.
|
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Bait for spammers:
root@localhost
postmaster@localhost
admin@localhost
abuse@localhost
postmaster@[127.0.0.1]
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Darren Harris
Guest
|
| Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2003 7:29 am Post subject: Re: Help: Building A System Around Seagate Drives |
|
|
| Quote: | Sorry, in 2K, and possibly in XP the page file is what used to be called the swapfile.
|
Wouldn't a smaller, faster drive be better for something like that?
| Quote: | Changing the boot drive in the scsi bios only takes like 5-10 seconds during post.
I can boot from J drive if I like but that's actually a storage drive on my system and not currently
with it's own OS on it. I have an Installs directory on the drive with copies of the installation
files of just about every util/browser/shell extension/MP3 player/prog on the system.
|
Is it possible to "boot" to a different drive without powering off
first?
| Quote: | A plain vanilla SCSI card won't hardware mirror tho it can be done in software.
I used to keep a mirror image of my C drive on another drive. If 2K ever went south badly enough
not to boot, I would just boot from the backup drive.
|
That's basically what I am attempting to accomplish.
| Quote: | Also, I don't know what kind of fans I'll need, but I do have a large
27 inch ATX case that I would like to use with this project.
Bay cooler fans to keep the drives cooler and less prone to failure.
I have a massive black real tower case. Don't recall how tall it is but it's just a little taller
than my desk.
Right now the sides are off my case but it's set up to blow out the back of the case more air than
it blows in the front. Thus it sucks external air in thru the vented bezels over the drives.
|
Your case sounds a lot like mine. It is a large CHIEFTEC DA-O1WD-FPD.
When I open the front, top panel, I see 6 large and 2 smaller bay
positions. And I have a couple of generic 400W power supplies. One
might work.(This is going to be a noisy machine).
| Quote: | All my drives spin down after like 15 minutes of no use. I used to use Adaptec's EZ-SCSI to do it
but I believe you're not supposed to use that in 2K, dunno. In any case the standard power
management controls it. Clicking on a link or drive in Windows Explorer will spin up the specific
drive on demand. Occasionally I can browse a drive in WE for a while and it'll give me the drive
contents that are cached. I can go where I want to and the drive won't spin up until I
copy/access/etc files on that drive. Good for me because I'm running like 8 actual hard drives and
I don't want them all spinning up when I just need to use one.
|
I use Windows 98, so I'll have to see what my options are for
individual drives powering up when accessed, and down when idle.
| Quote: | Don't know the specs on the controllers offhand. The thing to remember tho is that the best drives
aren't going to sustain external data transfers over 70meg/sec and probably far less.
If your drives sustain 30meg/sec then 2 properly striped drives could be said to dump 60meg/sec into
the raid controller. Getting a bunch of the fastest drives around and the fastest controller to run
them on is still going to bottleneck running on a 32/33 PCI slot.
|
Well, speed isn't going to be the issue. The goal is keeping hard
drives separate, mostly for virus reasons, and also still having "all"
my data if any single drive fails.
| Quote: | Knoppix version of Linux. Boots from a burned CD image, detects everything in the system, loads
it's own drivers for everything from onboard sound to NICs, configures itself, and lets him surf the
internet if he wants. Actually he just boots it for some of the games on the CD....
|
I'll probably use one drive for internet only, which will include
downloading and testing of software. I just don't want any of the
other drives to be affected if a virus gets through, or if there are
major software conflicts.
Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York. |
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Overlord
Guest
|
| Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2003 10:38 am Post subject: Re: Help: Building A System Around Seagate Drives |
|
|
On 22 Dec 2003 17:29:55 -0800, Searcher7@mail.con2.com (Darren Harris) wrote:
| Quote: | Sorry, in 2K, and possibly in XP the page file is what used to be called the swapfile.
Wouldn't a smaller, faster drive be better for something like that?
|
That's why I suggested putting 2 of the 10k drives with 2 of the 7200s with the main OS on the first
10k and the pagefile on the second 10k drive. Some people break up their drive into different
partitions with the OS on C, progs on D, swapfile on E, on the notion that if one of them craps out
they don't have to reinstall everything. The reality is that their CDE drives are on A single piece
of hardware and if it goes they're sunk. You are right tho, putting the swapfile on another drive
keeps the heads from fighting when you're accessing Windows, programs, and the swapfile at the
same time. The best thing is to have enough ram so you don't use the swapfile.
On occasion upgrading antique systems for people, I'll put in a cheap 56k hardware modem to replace
their 36k software modem, stick in a cheap ½gig drive to hold a swap file and get it off their C
drive, edit their registry to lower their MenuShowDelay from 400 to like 10 (makes it look mighty
fast!), kill off default processes they'll never use/need, murder all the crappy progs that try to
load at startup, nuke all the spyware that they never knew was watching where they went, what MP3s
they played, how long they stayed on what internet page, upgrade their drivers and/or OS, stick in
another SIMM so they may not need the swapfile, tighten the timings on their ram if it'll handle it,
that kind of thing. Most of 'em give you that cow watching cars pass on the highway and say,
"defrag?". Helps to schedule a defrag at some odd time of the night and they can let it happen or
not but sooner or later they won't kill it and it'll clean up their system without me looking over
their shoulder.
How you set it up will depend on what you're trying to accomplish.
| Quote: |
Changing the boot drive in the scsi bios only takes like 5-10 seconds during post.
I can boot from J drive if I like but that's actually a storage drive on my system and not currently
with it's own OS on it. I have an Installs directory on the drive with copies of the installation
files of just about every util/browser/shell extension/MP3 player/prog on the system.
Is it possible to "boot" to a different drive without powering off
first?
Uhhhh........ a warm boot will keep your drives from spinning down so you don't have to wait on them |
to spin back up. You don't have to do a stone cold boot to boot to a different drive.
| Quote: | A plain vanilla SCSI card won't hardware mirror tho it can be done in software.
I used to keep a mirror image of my C drive on another drive. If 2K ever went south badly enough
not to boot, I would just boot from the backup drive.
That's basically what I am attempting to accomplish.
I used to keep a mirror image of my directory structure on C on a different drive. All the backup |
directories were zipped up. If anything scr**ed up on C, I would just unzip from the backup
directory to where the prog went on the C drive. Later I kept a complete bootable clone of the C
drive on another drive. You can either clone the drive or.... pull the drives, install a minimal OS
on the backup drive, so it'll be 2k (or whatever) bootable, put the drives back, boot to C, delete
everything from the backup drive, boot to Knoppix from CD (everything loads into ram; it doesn't
care if there are no hard drives at all in the system) copy every directory from C to the backup
(since there isn't a single file locked, in use, or anything else on the C drive), and you have a
bootable mirror image of your boot C drive. If your progs are on another drive you could have
problems with your links tho.
| Quote: | Also, I don't know what kind of fans I'll need, but I do have a large
27 inch ATX case that I would like to use with this project.
Bay cooler fans to keep the drives cooler and less prone to failure.
I have a massive black real tower case. Don't recall how tall it is but it's just a little taller
than my desk.
Right now the sides are off my case but it's set up to blow out the back of the case more air than
it blows in the front. Thus it sucks external air in thru the vented bezels over the drives.
Your case sounds a lot like mine. It is a large CHIEFTEC DA-O1WD-FPD.
When I open the front, top panel, I see 6 large and 2 smaller bay
positions. And I have a couple of generic 400W power supplies. One
might work.(This is going to be a noisy machine).
Got mine a couple years ago at Circotech. Apparently they don't carry it anymore. It's got uh... |
looks like 11 5¼" bays and a lockable front door; lotsa elbow room! They don't carry the case
anymore but here's something they do have; a 120mm LED fan power supply;
http://www.circotech.com/yhst-1568194807313/si12qublledf.html
Mighty sharp. Sure would pull some air from the CPU....
| Quote: | All my drives spin down after like 15 minutes of no use. I used to use Adaptec's EZ-SCSI to do it
but I believe you're not supposed to use that in 2K, dunno. In any case the standard power
management controls it. Clicking on a link or drive in Windows Explorer will spin up the specific
drive on demand. Occasionally I can browse a drive in WE for a while and it'll give me the drive
contents that are cached. I can go where I want to and the drive won't spin up until I
copy/access/etc files on that drive. Good for me because I'm running like 8 actual hard drives and
I don't want them all spinning up when I just need to use one.
I use Windows 98, so I'll have to see what my options are for
individual drives powering up when accessed, and down when idle.
You should get someone's copy of EZ SCSI. As I recall you can set the idle time until spindown for |
each individual drive or force individual drives to immediately spin down.
| Quote: | Don't know the specs on the controllers offhand. The thing to remember tho is that the best drives
aren't going to sustain external data transfers over 70meg/sec and probably far less.
If your drives sustain 30meg/sec then 2 properly striped drives could be said to dump 60meg/sec into
the raid controller. Getting a bunch of the fastest drives around and the fastest controller to run
them on is still going to bottleneck running on a 32/33 PCI slot.
Well, speed isn't going to be the issue. The goal is keeping hard
drives separate, mostly for virus reasons, and also still having "all"
my data if any single drive fails.
It's a good idea. I wouldn't call it 100% iron clad that a virus couldn't jump drives tho. |
You might be better off with a removable drive caddy for your backup drive.
I know there are "switches" that let you selectively turn off IDE drives, in effect removing them
from the system electronically. Does a nice job if you do real work on the system but your kids are
prone to dl all kinds of questionable crap. Your work is safe.
I have/installed/use PC Cillin, F-Prot, AVG, and a couple others. I never let anything run in the
background. They run when I say they run. PC-Cillin has a nice feature tho, I can dl a file, right
click it to bring up properties, and PC-C puts in an extra property page, that when I click the tab
it immediately does a scan of the file and gives me the results. Mighty handy for MY questionable
crap.
| Quote: | Knoppix version of Linux. Boots from a burned CD image, detects everything in the system, loads
it's own drivers for everything from onboard sound to NICs, configures itself, and lets him surf the
internet if he wants. Actually he just boots it for some of the games on the CD....
I'll probably use one drive for internet only, which will include
downloading and testing of software. I just don't want any of the
other drives to be affected if a virus gets through, or if there are
major software conflicts.
~~~~~~ |
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postmaster@[127.0.0.1]
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Darren Harris
Guest
|
| Posted: Wed Dec 24, 2003 11:16 am Post subject: Re: Help: Building A System Around Seagate Drives |
|
|
kurt_SPAMLESS@hotmail.com (Overlord) wrote in message news:<3fe7b7e3.5112406@news.central.cox.net>...
| Quote: | On 22 Dec 2003 17:29:55 -0800, Searcher7@mail.con2.com (Darren Harris) wrote:
Sorry, in 2K, and possibly in XP the page file is what used to be called the swapfile.
Wouldn't a smaller, faster drive be better for something like that?
That's why I suggested putting 2 of the 10k drives with 2 of the 7200s with the main OS on the first
10k and the pagefile on the second 10k drive. Some people break up their drive into different
partitions with the OS on C, progs on D, swapfile on E, on the notion that if one of them craps out
they don't have to reinstall everything. The reality is that their CDE drives are on A single piece
of hardware and if it goes they're sunk. You are right tho, putting the swapfile on another drive
keeps the heads from fighting when you're accessing Windows, programs, and the swapfile at the
same time. The best thing is to have enough ram so you don't use the swapfile.
On occasion upgrading antique systems for people, I'll put in a cheap 56k hardware modem to replace
their 36k software modem, stick in a cheap ½gig drive to hold a swap file and get it off their C
drive, edit their registry to lower their MenuShowDelay from 400 to like 10 (makes it look mighty
fast!), kill off default processes they'll never use/need, murder all the crappy progs that try to
load at startup, nuke all the spyware that they never knew was watching where they went, what MP3s
they played, how long they stayed on what internet page, upgrade their drivers and/or OS, stick in
another SIMM so they may not need the swapfile, tighten the timings on their ram if it'll handle it,
that kind of thing. Most of 'em give you that cow watching cars pass on the highway and say,
"defrag?". Helps to schedule a defrag at some odd time of the night and they can let it happen or
not but sooner or later they won't kill it and it'll clean up their system without me looking over
their shoulder.
How you set it up will depend on what you're trying to accomplish.
|
I don't think I'll need to worry to much about the swap file, since
I'm a ram junkie and intend to max out the mobo in that respect.If I
had to wrry about the swap file, then IO'd think that the highest RPM
drive would work better in that position.
I'm thinking of putting two partitions on the first "C" drive. One for
the OS(Win98SE), and one for the apps. The second drive would be for
the storage the storage for apps of lesser importance, and everything
else as far as personal and program files and folders.(Win98SE here
also).
An Anti-virus, Firewall, Mirroring software, and spyware and Pop-up
killers, are all I intend to install as far as system maintenance
apps. And a mirroring program that I can run from a floppy or CD.(I
have "Drive Image", but someone recommended "Drive Copy").
The two slower drives will be used to mirror the first two physical
drives respectively. I only wish that I could do a real time back-up
of these drives whenever I wanted to. This of course would require
writing identically to two drives.
I have no idea what "tighten the timings" on ram is supposed to mean,
"edit their registry to lower their MenuShowDelay" means, or how to
"kill off default processes" that will not be needed, but you seem to
know your stuff, and I wish I could find someone in my area who knows
how to do all this.
| Quote: | Uhhhh........ a warm boot will keep your drives from spinning down so you don't have to wait on them
to spin back up. You don't have to do a stone cold boot to boot to a different drive.
|
Okay, but I still would like the option of powering off the two
storage drives, and just as important have the ability to power them
on and have Windows still see them.
| Quote: | A plain vanilla SCSI card won't hardware mirror tho it can be done in software.
I used to keep a mirror image of my C drive on another drive. If 2K ever went south badly enough
not to boot, I would just boot from the backup drive.
That's basically what I am attempting to accomplish.
I used to keep a mirror image of my directory structure on C on a different drive. All the backup
directories were zipped up. If anything scr**ed up on C, I would just unzip from the backup
directory to where the prog went on the C drive. Later I kept a complete bootable clone of the C
drive on another drive. You can either clone the drive or.... pull the drives, install a minimal OS
on the backup drive, so it'll be 2k (or whatever) bootable, put the drives back, boot to C, delete
everything from the backup drive, boot to Knoppix from CD (everything loads into ram; it doesn't
care if there are no hard drives at all in the system) copy every directory from C to the backup
(since there isn't a single file locked, in use, or anything else on the C drive), and you have a
bootable mirror image of your boot C drive. If your progs are on another drive you could have
problems with your links tho.
|
That is why I want to keep it simple. Mirroring(or cloning) one drive
to another would accomplish what I need.
| Quote: | Well, speed isn't going to be the issue. The goal is keeping hard
drives separate, mostly for virus reasons, and also still having "all"
my data if any single drive fails.
It's a good idea. I wouldn't call it 100% iron clad that a virus couldn't jump drives tho.
You might be better off with a removable drive caddy for your backup drive.
I know there are "switches" that let you selectively turn off IDE drives, in effect removing them
from the system electronically. Does a nice job if you do real work on the system but your kids are
prone to dl all kinds of questionable crap. Your work is safe.
|
If I can just power down any drive, then a drive caddy wouldn't be of
any extra benefit, because I'd still have to plug those drives back
into my sytem(making them vulnerable again) to back up to them.
| Quote: | I have/installed/use PC Cillin, F-Prot, AVG, and a couple others. I never let anything run in the
background. They run when I say they run. PC-Cillin has a nice feature tho, I can dl a file, right
click it to bring up properties, and PC-C puts in an extra property page, that when I click the tab
it immediately does a scan of the file and gives me the results. Mighty handy for MY questionable
crap.
|
PC-cillin is what I've decided on also.
I was thinking of trying to use the motherboard and SCSI controller in
my dead system, but I really want to get a Pentium 4 mobo, and the one
I have is maxed out with a Pentium 2(450) on it. Outside of that, I
have to find that EZ-SCSI software you mentioned.
Actually, I'd probably better get a floppy drive and a DVD/CD burner
also. :-)
Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York. |
|
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|
Overlord
Guest
|
| Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2003 12:45 am Post subject: Re: Help: Building A System Around Seagate Drives |
|
|
On 23 Dec 2003 21:16:06 -0800, Searcher7@mail.con2.com (Darren Harris) wrote:
| Quote: | kurt_SPAMLESS@hotmail.com (Overlord) wrote in message news:<3fe7b7e3.5112406@news.central.cox.net>...
On 22 Dec 2003 17:29:55 -0800, Searcher7@mail.con2.com (Darren Harris) wrote:
Sorry, in 2K, and possibly in XP the page file is what used to be called the swapfile.
Wouldn't a smaller, faster drive be better for something like that?
That's why I suggested putting 2 of the 10k drives with 2 of the 7200s with the main OS on the first
10k and the pagefile on the second 10k drive. Some people break up their drive into different
partitions with the OS on C, progs on D, swapfile on E, on the notion that if one of them craps out
they don't have to reinstall everything. The reality is that their CDE drives are on A single piece
of hardware and if it goes they're sunk. You are right tho, putting the swapfile on another drive
keeps the heads from fighting when you're accessing Windows, programs, and the swapfile at the
same time. The best thing is to have enough ram so you don't use the swapfile.
On occasion upgrading antique systems for people, I'll put in a cheap 56k hardware modem to replace
their 36k software modem, stick in a cheap ½gig drive to hold a swap file and get it off their C
drive, edit their registry to lower their MenuShowDelay from 400 to like 10 (makes it look mighty
fast!), kill off default processes they'll never use/need, murder all the crappy progs that try to
load at startup, nuke all the spyware that they never knew was watching where they went, what MP3s
they played, how long they stayed on what internet page, upgrade their drivers and/or OS, stick in
another SIMM so they may not need the swapfile, tighten the timings on their ram if it'll handle it,
that kind of thing. Most of 'em give you that cow watching cars pass on the highway and say,
"defrag?". Helps to schedule a defrag at some odd time of the night and they can let it happen or
not but sooner or later they won't kill it and it'll clean up their system without me looking over
their shoulder.
How you set it up will depend on what you're trying to accomplish.
I don't think I'll need to worry to much about the swap file, since
I'm a ram junkie and intend to max out the mobo in that respect.If I
had to wrry about the swap file, then IO'd think that the highest RPM
drive would work better in that position.
I'm thinking of putting two partitions on the first "C" drive. One for
the OS(Win98SE), and one for the apps. The second drive would be for
the storage the storage for apps of lesser importance, and everything
else as far as personal and program files and folders.(Win98SE here
also).
An Anti-virus, Firewall, Mirroring software, and spyware and Pop-up
killers, are all I intend to install as far as system maintenance
apps. And a mirroring program that I can run from a floppy or CD.(I
have "Drive Image", but someone recommended "Drive Copy").
The two slower drives will be used to mirror the first two physical
drives respectively. I only wish that I could do a real time back-up
of these drives whenever I wanted to. This of course would require
writing identically to two drives.
I have no idea what "tighten the timings" on ram is supposed to mean,
|
My ram runs 2-2-2-5 timings. When I got over 140mhz this Asus mb would default to just about
the worst timings imaginable; 3-3-3-7. It would default to this without warning/telling you no
matter what was set in the BIOS. It's a "feature" for stability. I, of course, hunted around until
I found a hacked BIOS that disables this "feature". I have good ram and if I ever get really
radical with overclocking the ram, I can open up the timings a bit if I have to. Right now I have
no stability problems tho.
Since you're a ram junkie, I would expect you to get quality ram. You can get more speed from the
system by experimenting and then telling it what timings to run as opposed to letting it do what it
wants. I've run quality Micron PC100 ram as PC133 with only minor timing tweaking.
Also, on occasion a manufacturer may downgrade perfectly good hardware to lower specs because that's
what he needs to sell at the moment
| Quote: | "edit their registry to lower their MenuShowDelay" means, or how to
In the registry, there is a default delay timer for popping out the cascading menus like when you |
run the cursor up Start/Programs/Games/Unreal Tournament/ the submenus pop out the side after a
slight delay. In Win2K the default delay is 400 (ms?). Editing the value to a lower number makes
the system look much faster. I can run my cursor up lists of programs and the submenus are like a
machine gun. Sounds like one too because I set a very tiny blip for the menu popups in Sounds.
It also takes a steady mouse hand because getting off a line of a submenu for a fraction of a second
will bring up the menu item behind it. Somewhat skittish but then so is a racecar.
| Quote: | "kill off default processes" that will not be needed, but you seem to
Some Win flavors have loadqm.exe running in the background. It keeps track of what |
hardware/software you have, what you're doing, what programs died a horrible death, and it phones
home to M$ with it. I do not require my system to phone home like ET.
There are also other default system processes that load/start automatically. Some of them have no
place in my system and/or refer to hardware that I don't have. I don't recall if it loads
automatically in 2K or not but I have no smart cards. I certainly don't need not 1 but 2! processes
loading to handle smart cards; sucking up my ram to no good purpose.
2K has a process specifically for remote registry manipulation that loads automatically.
Can you say (Another) gaping security hole?
2K has a default "Run As" process. If my 7 year old has a registry problem on his system, I go down
the hall and fix it on/from his system. It isn't like he's in another building/floor/office.
Things like that...
| Quote: | know your stuff, and I wish I could find someone in my area who knows
how to do all this.
Uhhhh........ a warm boot will keep your drives from spinning down so you don't have to wait on them
to spin back up. You don't have to do a stone cold boot to boot to a different drive.
Okay, but I still would like the option of powering off the two
storage drives, and just as important have the ability to power them
on and have Windows still see them.
All your drives will/should spin up when the SCSI card polls them. After they haven't been accessed |
in a while, your Power Options in 98/SE/ME/2k should spin them down. They come back up when needed.
I don't really recall if they will do this in 98/me.
| Quote: |
A plain vanilla SCSI card won't hardware mirror tho it can be done in software.
I used to keep a mirror image of my C drive on another drive. If 2K ever went south badly enough
not to boot, I would just boot from the backup drive.
That's basically what I am attempting to accomplish.
~~~~~~ |
Bait for spammers:
root@localhost
postmaster@localhost
admin@localhost
abuse@localhost
postmaster@[127.0.0.1]
uce@ftc.gov
~~~~~~
Remove "spamless" to email me. |
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|
|
Darren Harris
Guest
|
| Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2003 11:44 pm Post subject: Re: Help: Building A System Around Seagate Drives |
|
|
| Quote: | I have no idea what "tighten the timings" on ram is supposed to mean,
My ram runs 2-2-2-5 timings. When I got over 140mhz this Asus mb would default to just about
the worst timings imaginable; 3-3-3-7. It would default to this without warning/telling you no
matter what was set in the BIOS. It's a "feature" for stability. I, of course, hunted around until
I found a hacked BIOS that disables this "feature". I have good ram and if I ever get really
radical with overclocking the ram, I can open up the timings a bit if I have to. Right now I have
no stability problems tho.
Since you're a ram junkie, I would expect you to get quality ram. You can get more speed from the
system by experimenting and then telling it what timings to run as opposed to letting it do what it
wants. I've run quality Micron PC100 ram as PC133 with only minor timing tweaking.
Also, on occasion a manufacturer may downgrade perfectly good hardware to lower specs because that's
what he needs to sell at the moment
|
I'll have to look for sites that show how to perform these
manipulations.
| Quote: | "edit their registry to lower their MenuShowDelay" means, or how to
In the registry, there is a default delay timer for popping out the cascading menus like when you
run the cursor up Start/Programs/Games/Unreal Tournament/ the submenus pop out the side after a
slight delay. In Win2K the default delay is 400 (ms?). Editing the value to a lower number makes
the system look much faster. I can run my cursor up lists of programs and the submenus are like a
machine gun. Sounds like one too because I set a very tiny blip for the menu popups in Sounds.
It also takes a steady mouse hand because getting off a line of a submenu for a fraction of a second
will bring up the menu item behind it. Somewhat skittish but then so is a racecar.
|
I'll have to find step-by-step instructions on how to do this also.
| Quote: | "kill off default processes" that will not be needed, but you seem to
Some Win flavors have loadqm.exe running in the background. It keeps track of what
hardware/software you have, what you're doing, what programs died a horrible death, and it phones
home to M$ with it. I do not require my system to phone home like ET.
There are also other default system processes that load/start automatically. Some of them have no
place in my system and/or refer to hardware that I don't have. I don't recall if it loads
automatically in 2K or not but I have no smart cards. I certainly don't need not 1 but 2! processes
loading to handle smart cards; sucking up my ram to no good purpose.
2K has a process specifically for remote registry manipulation that loads automatically.
Can you say (Another) gaping security hole?
2K has a default "Run As" process. If my 7 year old has a registry problem on his system, I go down
the hall and fix it on/from his system. It isn't like he's in another building/floor/office.
Things like that...
|
Now, this is very important to me. I want my ram as "clean" as
possible, after booting up, and I've found no accurate online
instructions that cover everything, as far as how to do this.
In my ideal machine, nothing should "automatically" run in the
background or anywhere else, unless it is *necessary*.
| Quote: | know your stuff, and I wish I could find someone in my area who knows
how to do all this.
Uhhhh........ a warm boot will keep your drives from spinning down so you don't have to wait on them
to spin back up. You don't have to do a stone cold boot to boot to a different drive.
Okay, but I still would like the option of powering off the two
storage drives, and just as important have the ability to power them
on and have Windows still see them.
All your drives will/should spin up when the SCSI card polls them. After they haven't been accessed
in a while, your Power Options in 98/SE/ME/2k should spin them down. They come back up when needed.
I don't really recall if they will do this in 98/me.
|
I'm still looking for this "E-Z SCSI" you mentioned.
BTW, the same case I have, but mine is black:
http://www.isitoday.com/fullchassis/da01wd.htm
What Asus mobo do you have? I'm shopping for one now and was thinking
about what you said about over-clocking and how tempermental SCSI can
get. Is it possible to have SCSI and non-SCSI drives in the same
system using two different controllers?
I'm entertaining the prospect of making this a Pentium 4 "game
machine", and the most difficult decision for me is figuring out if I
should get a mobo that supports an 800 FSB processor. Since I my next
machine after this one will be 64 bit friendly, at that time the top
FSB for processors might go up(ie: 1600FSB). If this happens, then why
bother with the 800FSB mobo right now when I don't intend to get a
processor with an 800 FSB until the 3.2Ghz(Extreme Edition) prices are
forced down by the pending 64 bit explosion? See my dilemma? :-)
So perhaps I should just settle on a cheaper one that supports 400 FSB
processors and don't worry about getting the 3.2Ghz(EE). Instead just
jump to until 64 bit when it is nore widely supported.
Anyway, the only no-brainers for me at the moment are:
Dual Channel DDR
AGP Pro
ATX form factor
(I believe that most of the other needed features are now standard on
the new motherboards).
Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York. |
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