cheap SCSI enclosure?

[Mark J. Dulcey]

Seth Gordon wrote:
> My wife's employer has officially "deactivated" her old desktop machine, 
> a 400-MHz Macintosh G4 with 1 GB of RAM.  I am tempted to use this for a 
> new server, instead of going out and buying a new Intel box.
> 
> One catch: I want to attach a few SCSI drives to my new machine to do 
> RAID on it.  For fifty bucks, I can get a four-pack of 47-GB SCSI 
> Ultra/Wide drives 
> (http://www.softwareandstuff.com/h_hd_ST446442W4.html), but these are 
> full-height 5.25" drives -- I'm not sure I can even fit one of them 
> inside the G4's case.  So if I get the G4 and the drives, I'll need an 
> external SCSI enclosure.
> 
> Can anyone recommend a source for reasonably-priced enclosures? Googling 
> turns up a lot of sites selling U160 or U320 enclosures, which is more 
> than I need; the only brand that *seems* appropriate for this kind of 
> drive is Manhattan (http://www.netcables.com/item_view.cfm?id=163392).

If you're on a budget, buy an old full-height tower computer case 
(typically available for next to nothing at flea markets, though you 
might have to remove a useless motherboard and so forth from it ;) and 
put the drives in there. Then get one of those internal-to-external 
adapter plates and an internal SCSI cable for the tower, put it in one 
of the empty slots, and you're good to go. (I recommend the new-fangled 
twisted-flat cables that are rated for U160 or U320, even though you're 
not going to run those speeds; I've had the best results with them.)