24 Oct
2004
24 Oct
'04
8:37 a.m.
On Sunday 24 October 2004 12:22, Pete Turnbull wrote:
On Oct 24 2004, 11:22, John Foust wrote:
Qlogic ISP2200s. Copper FC for now down to $20-$50, with fabric and AL
support, as eBay prices. I managed to get lucky and get a pair of
cards for $5 recently, from my "usual suplier".
I recently inherited a stack of Fibre Channel
gizmos made by
Compaq: three x12 hubs, a tape controller, and a Storageworks
modular data router.
eBay prices are all over the map: some sellers trying to
unload them for $1000+, but the real auctions are going for
less than $50 for each box. Each slot in the hub needs an
optical transceiver; these seem to sell for $10 each.
Cables? Many offered, few bidders. FC hard drives? $20 each.
This stuff cost a fortune not so long ago. Why is it
rock-bottom now? Will it ever be attractive to hobbyists?
Because serious users have upgraded and the cast-offs aren't very
popular, I suspect. To users who think SCSI is odd, FC probably
seems wierd for words (look at the interface on the back of those
drives). They also tend to be small and relatively power hungry,
compared to cheap ATA drives, and how many cheap FC-AL PCI cards have
you seen for a PC? I've got some FC-AL RAID stuff, but it's on an
Origin 2000, and
anyway it's all 9GB drives. Hardly something buyers would fight
over.
Yeah, part of the reason I got the stuff I got is because the FC stuff
was all 36GB and 50GB drives.
Pat
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