IBM 3650x

[hitchcockgreen]

Nabbed one I decommissioned at work.

Installed VMware hypervisor and (so far) two virtual servers on it and a virtual appliance.

The iSCSI I'm using has serious issues though. May nab the spare Drobo that's been sitting in my office for three months as a replacement.

Anyone else used drobo? I have mixed feelings about their devices.

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[FirBirGir]

I haven't used SCSI in a while, we went fiber channel at work and the new SATA drives at 7200rpms are more than adequate at home.

Are you going to use it for your server to host your websites?

[hitchcockgreen]

Maybe.
The iscsi is just for a local media server. Drobo is a pos though so I'll end up doing something else there.
so far there are two virtual servers on it and to virtual appliances.
Neither the servers are really doing anything right now.

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[Blunt Force Trauma]

Don't know about the Drobo, but I purchased the Seagate BlackArmor 4TB NAS about 18 months ago and was extremely disappointed. Sent it back. Very slow internally as well as their provided VPN service.

[hitchcockgreen]

I grabbed a couple of iomega storcenter cast offs in hopes that I could get them running again but no dice.
at least they were true iscsi - the drobo is not. This model only does "network shares" and doesn't even use RAID it uses "beyond raid" which is a marketing term I think they coined which means "nonsense."

I'm fairly certain hypervisor would still work with the drobo but I'd be reluctant to use it to house virtual machines. Network storage file access for VMS but that's about it.

I also somehow managed to mess up some networking configuration on the physical server so I'll probably just do it over from scratch tonight (installing hypervisor with a basic configuration takes maybe 20 minutes).

The physical server itself only has two mirrored 250gb drives which will probably hold 3-4 servers on it depending on the OS and utility of each but the data store certainly wouldn't have enough space left over for file storage.

I think I have a couple of 300gb drives at work that are unused (blade is going in soon so I've been clearing out the racks quite a bit - lots of spare parts!) but nothing higher than that.

Maybe I can find another iscsi to use. I have something else I can try - a promise raid array but its off warranty and had a firmware failure a year or so ago and was just shelved. That'd be kind of overkill for my needs (if I could get it running) but would work.

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[FFAxTomcat480]

I used SCSI up until the end of last year. All I used were Seagate Barracuda or Cheetah 80 pin drives. One of the drives a Seagate Cheetah stayed on for four years straight without a hiccup. Seagate SCSI drives are very reliable - but their acoustics are LOUD !!!!

[hitchcockgreen]

I just took a hammer to 20+ old SCSI drives last week. They just aren't used any more and their capacity was lacking.

[hitchcockgreen]

The biggest issue so far with my new setup is for the media server VM.
ESX 5 supports USB passthrough and right now that's my only option for connecting 2 TB of data that can be shared out to the PS3.
That's what I did beforehand, but in that instance it was a physical server with two 1tb hard drives in it. this was an old desktop converted to server status and let's just say it ran pretty hot.
With the new setup it runs cool as hell while running three VMs within a single physical server.

I'd prefer to have an isolated subnet for sharing out iscsi or even a VLAN but I don't have the hardware to do that at the moment.
Guess I'll test tonight and see how well it works...consolidating all that media onto a single 2 tb drive is going to take quite some time though.

[Blunt Force Trauma]

Never trash a platter HD before getting the 2 kidney-shaped neodymium magnets first, very nice.

[hitchcockgreen]

Meh. I'll keep that in mind for next time

These had sensitive data that I didn't want retrieved and had to take some work related frustrations out somehow.

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[FFAxTomcat480]

U320 SCSI was fast hehe...... 10 years ago

[hitchcockgreen]

Never trash a platter HD before getting the 2 kidney-shaped neodymium magnets first, very nice.

I've got a couple of seagates in my basement; a 1tb and a 2tb. They've been flagged as "bad" by two different network appliances but probably relatively safe for home use although I'm starting to get pickier about that kind of thing. I may pull the magnets from those....or one of the smaller capacity drives I have kicking around that I never use.

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[hitchcockgreen]

U320 SCSI was fast hehe...... 10 years ago

He he exactly. Not so great now.

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[Blunt Force Trauma]

Most of the two identical magnets in single or double platter drives nowadays are around 3mm thick, but still worth harvesting.

I have four huge 5 or 6mm older ones that are quite powerful. HCG, if you have some drives with 4 or more platters, you may find some sweet thick ones as well.

Sometimes they are mechanically bound by a clip. If so, that is great, just unpry them and you're good to go. However, you will probably find them bonded to a mounting piece. You may have to pop them free, you'll find you will most likely lose the chrome coating on one surface. Be a little careful because you can chip them up trying to free them.What I do is stick them together to make one thick magnet.

There's also some high precision bearings in them as well, but I've yet to find a use for them.

Hehe, I just so happen to have a pic of the last HD I took apart. . .

[FFAxTomcat480]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cX2yDSE ... re=related

[Dx.]

Why do you want the magnets, coons like toys?

[hitchcockgreen]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cX2yDSE ... re=related

I've seen better ones than that.

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[hitchcockgreen]

Why do you want the magnets, coons like toys?

They're shiny.

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[Blunt Force Trauma]

Strong magnets are great for all sorts of things. They are the strongest refrigerator magnets you'll ever find. I have 4 or so attached to an 8" long stick attached to a broom handle for picking up stuff in the garage, or finding metal parts in grass or underwater. I have odds and ends in glass mason jars with magnets on the underside of the lid and stick them to a mounted flat stock in the garage. Put one in your oil pan if there's not one in there already. Use them in the kitchen to mount knives to a surface. The uses are endless, especially since neodymium magnets have such sky high coercivity and virtually never lose their strength.

[hitchcockgreen]

Lol recently our intern took apart a bunch of hard drives but not for the magnets but because he thought he'd harvest gold out of them.

Be a while before he lives that down.

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