The saga of the 500GB

[mike808@users.sourceforge.net]

This is roughly from my looking-like-a-blog page at
http://www.sluug.org/~mike808/

* December 01, 2002
As some of you may know, the 500GB array lost a power supply mid-November. 
MTI, the manufacturer, was no help in obtaining a replacement, refurb, or 
salvage. Although, their local rep was very helpful (off the record) in 
providing information about the unit, its history, and so forth, they never 
did get us anything tangible to work with for their own product.

We found an alternate OEM firm, Xyratex, that has a darn-near-identical product,
but they wanted $600 for a power module. Strangely enough, I found 
an identical MTI chassis with 18.2GB drives in it (216GB) up on eBay just 
before Thanksgiving. An email later, Steve Pritchard snagged the winning bid.
Behold, the power of the URL.

Over the holiday weekend, Jeff Licquia of LUCI picked up the beast and brought
it home to Steve and Kara's. I believe Steve is planning to sell the drives to
raise funds to pay for the unit. So if you need an 18.2GB SCSI SCA (hot-swap)
7200rpm drive, talk to Steve. We should see the unit back in full operation
(both power modules) soon. Luckily, these things have redundant power supplies
in the first place!

The drives were moved to the new chassis and installed into the nifty 5 foot 
HP rack with a 2200VA UPS that Mike808 was able to obtain (all at no charge
via some serious horse trading) for LUG equipment.

Thanks Steve and Kara! Thanks Jeff!
Just don't ask them "What's beeping?"

* November 30, 2002
I hope everyone snagged all the goodies they wanted with the heads-up from
those Black Friday lists of factual information posted around the net.
I snagged the 120GB for $90 and the 350VA UPS for $0 and the usual free
CDRs. I've heard to avoid the "Khypermedia" brand for >24x burning. Apparently
the "K" stands for Kr@ppy, and that the media layer tends to stick to the
adjacent disk, tearing as you remove one from the spindle. Not good.

* September 16, 2002
The array funding has been completed and we've reached our goal. Any further
contributions will go to KSPEI to help with their ongoing bandwidth costs for
the FTP sites.

Please consider a contribution when you download an ISO - it costs them roughly
$1.85 to provide the bandwith used to transfer 700MB (assuming full usage of the
T1). 

Mike808/

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