Where do you store all this stuff????(long)

[jens g.r. benthien]

Guys,

this is a great topic!

I think you all consider yourself professionals. But be honest: who of you features an SCSI subsystem?

Sure, it's expensive, but offers several advantages: you can connect up to 14 devices (actually 15, but the controller itself is considered to be one device, usually at ID #7). Hot plug feature: swap, connect or disconnect any device at any time. FAST. Reliable. Absolutely hassle free. Easy to set up and config. A **standard**.

I have an Adaptec 29140 controller in my new system, an Adaptec 2940 in my 'old' system, and an Adaptec PCMCIA card in my laptop. (you really don't have to go with Adaptec, other vendors offer rock solid controllers as well, but since I started with that brand...)

And following drives:
on the 'new' system a 9.1 GB SCSI LVD HDD with the OS, partitioned into 3 physical drives, booting device, a 80 GB IBM ATA HDD for data, partitioned into 4 physical drives, a SCSI CD-R and a SCSI CD-RW (both interal). External devices are one SCSI Iomega Jazz with 1 GB (6 disks total), one SCSI ZIP drive (100MB, 20 disks, kind of outdated), one external SCSI tower with 2 SCSI (UltraWide) drives 9.1 GB each. And a SCSI scanner is connected as well.

On the 'old' system there are 3 SCSI HDDs (UW) with 4 GB each, on external SCSI tower with one 4 GB UW drive, a SCSI CD-R.

On the laptop one external SCSI tower with a 4 GB SCSI UW HDD and a SCSI CD-R

Lot's-a-stuff, I know. Everything is connected with a 100M network, including the office of my wife.

And now the big advantage of SCSI: I can simply connect the JAZ to ANY of the machines - hot plugging IS possible. Why this? Because copying files to an external drive is gazillions times faster than via the network.

But I'm not limited to switch the Jazz drive - I can connect all external SCSI towers to any machine - plug & run.

Heating problem: none, because I can power on and off all drives at any time. Good for the summer. And in winter I can leave them running, so I don't need to turn on the office heating at all.

Backup system:

all customer files are stored in a separate directory with subdirs for textures, shapes, CAD files, pictures, text, order, e-mail etc. - but never on the boot drive with the OS on it.

Every day I copy the whole 'customer tree' to the second HDD, every week to the Jazz drive. This is very fast and convenient.

After a project has been completed, I rar the customer tree as an exe file, give it a password and burn it to CD or a set of CD's.

In addition to this, the 'internal' SCSI HDD are in removable bays or drawers - I can remove a HDD while the machine is running and push it into another bay of another machine. So, even if one machine won't boot up, I can swap the HDD to another machine and continue working without having to panic in case I have to meet a deadline.

Sounds great? Believe me, it ** IS ** great.

Overkill? Maybe, but I love to implement good and advanced technologies.

So much for SCSI. I think many people think SCSI is for medium sized biz only, is complicated and difficult to manage. Wrong. It's made for everyone, smooth like silk, simple to manage, easy to install, and if you get rid of your machine (even after 5 years which seems to be an eternity in this tech area) you can plug the devices into your new machine without sweat. In short: it WORKS.

Now you might ask: but how will you be able to backup the 80 gig drive? Good question, and I don't have a solution, except that I will have to purchase another drive of that size and mirror the drives at least once a week. But it will be an ATA drive as well, because the SCSI with this size are far too expensive and extremely noisy.

Stu, I'm working with 1600 x 1200 32bit color on all machines except the laptop. I need this res because I leave my network monitor for the proxy, firewall server and router open to watch it, the phone system monitor, performance monitors, tiny helper apps etc.

And yes, what I fear most is a power failure, because the UPS had been outgrown by the hardware ;-}

Something else: an excellent software to manage your data is Windows Commander (www.ghisler.com). Comparing dirs, files, list and print dirs, sync dirs or drives is a snap with this powerful app. Give it a try! Comes with built in ZIP, RAR, LHA and other compressors, built-in full fledged and powerful FTP client, displays the whole networks with all drives (you can even integrate a remote drive on a server for instant access via drag & drop!!!), binhex support, file splitter, program launch bar (customizable!), ability to map network drives, ... but check out the features yourself.

I think it'll keep you busy playing with it for the weekend ;-}

jens

jens g.r. benthien
designer
http://jens.highspeedweb.net

[Earl]

Jens,

I agree, SCSI is great. I have one of the new SCSI Ultra160 (29160) adapters...64-bit PCI compatible. Transfers at a sweet 160 MB/sec. But SCSI really isn't for everyone. It's expensive for one. I personally don't think SCSI is worth it for Zip or CD devices. Only hard drives. And with that, you're looking at spending twice as much as someone else who buys an IDE drive. IDE drives can transfer much faster now - up to 100 MB/sec. And if you put them in RAID configuration, you can get almost the same performance as a regular SCSI setup. Now of course, there is SCSI RAID which would work much better as well...

But you do NOT have to use a SCSI system to be a professional! Not in the slightest. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[Gary David Bouton]

Stu--

You are soooo prolific, you need a CDRW, and you need to backup weekly!!! [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Something i left out of my solutions: cataloguing software. I use ULead's Album program, which comes with Capture and a pretty lame paint program (which is funny, because they used to OEM for Aldus...remember Aldus PhotoStyler version 1.0, circa 1992?)

Album doesn't care what bitmap format you use:Targa, BMP, TIFF, you name it. It does not do vector art previewing unless it can find a low rez bitmap header in the vector file.


Although it's much more cluttered today, here's a picture of my Small Office/Home Office.

You just can't see the air conditioning...


My Best,

Gary David Bouton
Gary@GaryDavidBouton.com
Free education! The Writings Web site
and the updated GaryWorld Gallery is pretty okay, too.