Earlier this year we got some 200 GB ATA 133 hard drives for one of our older machine. It was having a slow noisy head crash, sounding a little more like a dentist’s drill every day. It was only a matter of time before everything on its hard drive went away for good, so we backed it up to the server, slapped the new drives in, formatted them, and copied everything back.
In the process, we discovered that the machine we had put the drives into only had an ATA 66 interface. It could still use the drives, but only 137 GB or so of the total 200 would be visible. Kind of a waste, but better than having a drive that was slowly shaving itself down to aluminum confetti to the tune of Aphex Twin’s “Ventolin”.
Last week we got a new tower machine to replace the oldest production box. So we promptly began cannibalizing it for parts. It had the two huge drives in it, and those could best be used on our video capture machine. A little poking around in the online spec sheets though showed that it too only has an ATA 66 drive interface.
Fortunately, adding a better interface is as easy as dropping a new card into the PCI slot. We wound up getting the SIIG dual channel Ultra ATA card, which means that we can add two more drives if we feel the need. And can find room for them.
The inside of a Mac Tower machine is beautifully laid out. Even PC geeks like it enough to wedge a PC into one. You can easily have four drives mounted in the brackets on the bottom of the case: two in a double-height bay in the back, and one each in a middle and front bay. The power cords and data cables rest just out of the way of the the edge of the motherboard. Unfortunately, the ribbon cable that came with the interface card is not so brilliantly constructed. With the new drives side-by-side in the front and middle bays, the connectors on the cable are too close together to reach both drives. And you can’t use a double-high drive mount in either the front or middle bay… In front, it won’t fit under the speaker on the front bezel of the case, and in the middle it’s high enough to snap off the power connectors for the motherboard.
Since I didn’t have a replacement cable, I wound up having to use the double-height mount from the parts machine, but placed sideways across both the front and middle bays. It’s out of the way of the speaker and the motherboard power, but it’s not locked down securely… It’s in and it’s running though. And it’s seeing the full 200 GB of each drive. I’ve got them together as a striped RAID array, so it looks like a single 400 GB drive. Enough to hold 80 or so DVDs.
Right now the drive is empty, but I’m sure it’ll fill up. I was talking before the movie last night with a friend of mine who is the father of a 7 month old girl. He’s looking to get some new storage for his home computer, since his current drive seems to be increasingly populated with baby pictures and video. I theorized that computer data is like a gas: it obeys Boyle’s Law and expands to fit whatever container you put it into.