> the payoff of getting a couple of old, slow, small drives > going isn't quite there for me. (actually i have two chassis with > hot-swappable raid backplanes and 18gb drives.) you should get better > performance out of a $50 ata hard drive these days.
recently i decided to archive a dozen or so different varieties of scsi drive (fast/ultra/fast-wide/lvd) onto several big SATA drives (they'd all have fit on one big SATA but i wanted to separate two categories). when i started, i was idly wondering what to do with drives after i copied them-- surely i could use them in some constructive way. after each copy i did md5sums of the original drive, and the partition holding the copy on SATA. after that, there was no question that i would take all the SCSI drives for recycling. the SATA drives are much, much faster that the `fastest' of the old SCSI drives. i've kept several types of Symbios card just in case i come across some more data i'd like to copy from SCSI, but i'm unlikely to bother putting them in a machine. i also had a SCSI QIC tape drive, but that broke down as soon as i started to copy the data from the tapes, so all that went too. fortunately i'd copied those tapes onto Zip drives years ago, and even more surprisingly, i could read those, so i copied that data into my normal file system to sort through it. if i'd begrudged the space, i could have copied all the data onto a chunk of one of my tiny USB storage keys. it's really not worth the time and effort trying to do a driver just to keep the SCSI drives in service.
