RE: [OT] (A little) : Firewire cables...

["Phil Harris" <phil@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> er ... remind what this was all for ... ... the current system was
> working without any problem, at all ...
>=20
> withdrawal symptoms, presumably ... running a system without problems
> just don't seem right ?
>=20
> it's late ...
>=20
> Chris

No - current system working brilliantly but there are three identified
"needs"...

1) Short term major rebuild to get the physical size down quickly due to
moving house and not being able to house the server in its current big
"multi box" form whilst I'm lodging / dossing with friends and
most of my
kit is in a storage container.

2) Medium term increase in "grunt". The current setup is working
brilliantl=
y
and copes with streaming multiple audio streams, multiple video streams and
even multiple hi-def video streams (although multiple hi-def streams are
pushing it rather too hard for comfort) but when copying around large
amounts of data then an increase in disc-to-disc transfer rates would be
useful, an increase in LAN access speed would be really handy too (so
Gigabit rather than 100Mbit) and a bit more processing headroom is always
useful.

3) Long term increase in storage. Current platform is based around IDE
drives and was put together when 160Gb IDE drives were the biggest thing
available and were stupidly expensive. I think I have somewhere around
5-5.5Tb of storage (maybe more, maybe less) made up of odds and sods of
drives ranging from 160Gb to 320Gb (plus a 1Tb SATA) but it's spread across
so many drives (26 of them) that I really don't have a clue how much space
there is and what data is where (physically). Trying to move all data over
to 1Tb drives for point "1" (above) which means migrating all
drives over t=
o
SATA as the 1Tb drives aren't available as anything else.

I had found some 2 x 6 Pin Firewire400 + 1 x USB to SATA bridgeboards that
were quite cheap (=A325 or so) and I could have just substituted those (in
place of the old 2 x 6 Pin Firewire400 to IDE versions that I currently
have) as I went through retiring the old IDE drives so was going to stick
with those but they've since been discontinued.

To use any of the alternatives will require changing all my firewire
cablin=
g
which is a not inconsequential cost in itself (about =A3150 just on
firewir=
e
cables) and when you add in a dozen bridgeboards at about =A340 a pop plus
ideally a Firewire800 hub then it could well be cheaper to build a new
"server" which is what I ended up exploring yesterday.

The only thing I need to find now is a supplier for either of the original
style Coolermaster CM Stacker big tower cases ( http://tinyurl.com/3ydt5r o=
r
http://tinyurl.com/2yxncm ) so that I
can build a first iteration of the
machine that will satisfy the short term need for a one-box solution that
will take all my current data plus a bit of "spare" to tide me
over till I
sort out my new abode.

Phil