I've been working on getting things cleaned up in the
basement - and part of that involves putting these
devices I have into racks. Unfortunately, the devices
and the racks rarely find me at the same time, and as
such, I wind up with devices with rails bolted to the
side of them, and racks with no rails. But, since
rails consist of two parts, the rails on the devices
are useless, since I don't have the mating rails. I
want to rack up a Cipher drive, and my newly accquired
Fujitsu Eagle, and I also have a shelf meant for two
CDC sabre drives, that will work to hold another CDC
drive I have (non sabre, the older one, 9" platters),
it should hold the weight. But, none of the rails I
have match up, and the CDC shelf uses a special
bracket.
I have a couple modern PC clone and Sun servers with
full railsets, and I tried borrowing rails from them,
but of course the holes don't line up with the holes
in the devices. And the Dell rails might have worked
if they were meant to mount to a standard rack - I
have no idea what this square clip/hole thing is
supposed to mate with.
So, basically, is there a standard for these things
at all? Any hole spacing or rail size standard, or did
every manufacurere just make their own? On the two
Cipher drives I have, the same model, have totally
different rails. So that would suggest that there was
at least a device bolt hole standard at one point.
But, I am sure this is going to be another case of how
wonderful standards are - there are so many to choose
from... Is there some designation I should look for
when hunting rack rails on eBay? The modern rails
don't seem to line up with the device holes at all -
are there differnt classes or rails for different
weights, or am I just lookig too far into this?
-Ian