DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I’ve been a SCSI snob ever since Apple started using SCSI in the Mac Plus. Even when Apple dumped SCSI in favor of lower-cost IDE/ATA components, which any Mac aficionado will tell you are inferior and slightly embarrassing, and which can be admitted only under one’s breath at the local “Mac Marginalization” meet-up, I remained a power SCSI user, clinging to the notion that because ATA requires a significant amount of oversight by the computer’s CPU, my hotrodded SCSI setup would be faster, sexier, and a lot more fun.

Case in point: my G4 workstation boots from an ATA drive (sshh!), but the applications reside on a striped RAID-0 array built from two Ultra2 Wide SCSI drives attached via a $50 cable (cheap!) to an Ultra2 Wide SCSI PCI card, promising a screaming 80 MB/s of data transfer. Having my apps on a striped volume means read performance should be even faster than that, because both disks can be read in parallel — so that any single drive only has to locate half the data sought.

A mirrored (RAID-1) partition on the same two drives stores my data. Having two copies of all my files means I’m a lot more likely to survive a disk crash without data loss.

But the machine that housed all this high-tech storage magic has been aging. 1000 MHz have never felt so slow. I finally pulled the trigger on a long-awaited upgrade: a dual-cpu G5.

First impressions: it’s huge. It weighs over 40 lbs. The case was milled from a single piece of aluminum. By hand! By old-world craftsmen in a small village in rural Germany!

My old G4 is smaller, lighter weight, and suddenly very plastic-y looking and quaint. But it has this advantage over the G5: three internal drive bays.

The G5 has exactly one open drive bay. Which means my two Ultra2 Wide SCSI drives would have to find another home. Crap.

I considered an aftermarket drive chassis. I considered external housings. And then I considered that my SCSI drives were just as old as my G4… and a light began to dawn…