External IDE stuff.

[Kryten]

Evening folks, hope everyone's good.

Quick question - been asked to look something up for work and need a little input.

I need a way to trail an IDE cable from a SFF PC to somewhere up to a meter and a half (a metre maybe at a push) away - to a sort of external caddy where an operator can plug in a drive and push the PC's power button for our software to securely wipe the drive for re-use. IDE cables max length is half a metre, and I don't want to trust the more expensive shielded cables that will go up to a metre in length.

I've looked into SATA converters, however our software's SATA handling is diabolical at best. It's far better with SCSI, but scsi bridges are bloody expensive.

Reason being, we currently just have a bank of 8 PC's on top of eachother and operator plugs/unplugs the HDD in teh front of each, scraping knuckles as they go. Rate of work means we need to raise this to 24 machines.

Ideally, the machines will be out of the way at the bottom, cables hidden and tidy (messy things, KVMs) and the only cabling coming up is that to the fixed IDE caddy thing.

Any help or input would be much appreciated.

 

[inactionman]

How's the software work with USB drives? You could just use a bunch of USB caddies, the one I have is both IDE and SATA. If you get ones like these and use USB then you don't have to worry about support.

What are you using? The latest beta of DBAN supports USB drives:

Darik's Boot and Nuke Beta Information

 

[Kryten]

It's handling of USB is far better than some SATA chipsets, however the letdown there is USB itself, it's far too slow - but again that could be due to the bridge chipset in the caddy, which is something we don't have time to test.
An IDE drive will typically wipe in 50-80 minutes depending on size - in a USB caddy, nearer 3 days.
We can't change software being used at all, as we have to remain under HMG approval and beyond, and this (Bloody awful) software is the only one that does.

Annoying really, as the US government approve the secure erasure utility built into the firmware of every hard drive over 10gb (except Maxtor, who've never followed a standard, ever).

Looks like my only option is just to build up far more racks of PC's and continue letting people de-knuckle themselves :/

 

[inactionman]

Hmm... I've been selling a few disks recently (moved to the hitachi terabyte drives is my desktop and NAS), so I've been wiping drives using both the SATA bus and my external caddy, it's normally been about 4-6 hours to do a 7 pass wipe on a 300gb drive. I guess it depends if it's connected via USB2, if it's just USB then I guess that would explain the slowness.

 

[ford prefect]

I use a firewire - IDE box which formats pretty fast. Handy little box, but then I use MAC's and PC's.

 

[Kryten]

Aye, this is a bit more than standard formatting though, and even more than multiple pass overwrites.

It's a very secure peice of software, specifically it runs on a 5-overwrite random character system which takes a very long time indeed.

I've not really thought about Firewire - trouble is finding an addon card that the software recognises. Won't hurt to try though, cheers.

 

[Bob007]

Had a think about this today in work(yes works that fun) i'd prob ask how much effort you want to put in more then anything.

As you know the "max" length for IDE is 48" (this is where signal becomes realy unstable, 18" recommended max) due to interference, but this can be helped the same way cat 5e/cat 6 works, twisting the strands of wires in pairs, adding some insulation around the outside and away ya go. Only problem is the work involved, getting the 40 wires shouldn't be a problem. twisting em in pairs could be a pain in the arse. Then you have to wire em up to the IDE connectors and test it out. I've heard of these "cables" being used for up to 100 feet(unconfirned), but as i said, lot of work.

 

[Bob007]

damn edit timer...

Or wire up 5 lengths of cat 5e to a couple of IDE connectors and play about with some lengths.

 

[Kryten]

Bob, thats not too far off an idea I was toying with myself.

Firstly, using high grade SCSI cable and chopping/adapting the ends, but even then it's still parallel signalling, whereas true SCSI has an "error" bit - the data is sent down 2 wires synchronously, as opposed to a single bit for IDE. External SCSI cabling is also often twisted pair.

Now, doing that with CAT5e...

Got endless supplies of it, won't be entirely difficult to do, it's properly shielded on top of the insulation, twisted pair - I suspect much of Monday may well be taken with giving it a try

Cheers, that's a good idea.

 

[WPKenny]

For extra twisty-ness lock the two ends into a drill and switch it on. Makes for much quick twisting and can be fun.

You could also braid your hair this way.*



















































*may result in loss of scalp.

 

[Kryten]

Think I'll stick to a couple of cable ties or cable sheathing, cheers