O SCSI folks, give me some advice...

[vputz]

...I've got an old Dell PowerVault 2300 with a 6-bank of SCSI drives and a SCSI tape drive. Well, I did have a 2300. It died a horrible death (motherboard went wonky). But I found another system which worked... however, the drives didn't fit into the new case.

So... I opened the top of the new (rackmount) case, opened the side of the 2300, and lay the 2300 on top of the rackmount with the SCSI cable going from the rackmount machine up to the drives. The 2300 turns on but does not operate, so its power supply provides power to the drives, while the rackmount box operates them.

It's hideous. I want to put FrankenServer out of its misery.

So, I found a good (and cheap) drive enclosure on eBay, a swell little rackmount beastie (an I-Bus RR4; see http://www.ibus.com/Products/Prod_sys_RR4_EN.html). I'm going to try and do some surgery and pull the SCSI backplane and enclosure out of the 2300 case and put it in the RR4, along with the tape drive. There are two IDE drives in there, too. If I can do the transplant, both the rackmount box and the RR4 can live happily in my wee little rack, and I will be able to get FrankenServer out of my closet, where it is howling anxiously (those 2300's have some LOUD fans).

The problem is connecting everything. I'm not sure I can get the IDE drives to work--that's a long way for an IDE cable, so they may live in the rackmount case (there seems to be room). But I'm anxious to do the SCSI thing right. My SCSI cards do have external connectors, but now I'm all confused about what cables to get and how to route them.

Should I...

• Get a long internal cable, route it out through the back of the case and into the back of the drive enclosure, connecting to the drives?
  
• Get an external cable, use the external port on the cards and up through the back of the enclosure, connecting it to the drives?
  
• Get an external cable, run that from the external port on the card up to the back of the enclosure, where I've found some way to put in an external port wired somehow to the drives, so the RR4 just looks like its own big SCSI device (can this even be done)?
  

The cards are adaptec AHA-2940U2/U2W (I think W, since they do have what looks like a 16-bit LVD connector; I haven't looked at the back in a while and probably can't see anything until I move FrankenServer out of the closet).

I'm a little at sea. Any help would be, well, helpful!

-->VPutz

[mark_alec]

This is a support request dealing with hardware, so I moved it to Kernel & Hardware.
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[vputz]

I trust the moderator. The moderator knows all (grin).

(though it's not truly a Gentoo-specific question--or even Linux-specific for that matter. But I'll take advice wherever I can get it!)

Thanks-->VPutz