24 Oct
2004
24 Oct
'04
4:31 a.m.
On Sunday 24 October 2004 11:22, John Foust wrote:
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?
Yeah, I found it really attractive because of the price, which is why I
bought 3.7-ish TB of it several months ago. I figured getting it at
less than $1/GB, including JBOD's, raid widgets, FC hubs, FC switches,
cables (all copper FC), a pair of racks, and PDUs, as well as 1.4TB
worth of 18GB SCSI drives (from an EMC I wished to use with my S/390
but didn't have any ESCON as expected) which was "thrown in" was a good
deal. And, the drives are probably more reliable than an off-the-shelf
[P|S]ATA drive.
Of course, the power comsumption on a 200GB+ IDE drive is probably less
than 1/4 that of four of my 50GB FC-AL disks...
Pat
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