Back in the early '90's, I bought a Tangent 486 EISA Server/Workstation which had a 32 bit EISA SCSI caching controller. It was the hottest Intel based system money could buy (over $7000 as I recall). It came with a single 160 MB Quantum SCSI drive and I soon added a 250 Seagate. A few months later I replaced the drives in several Sun Workstations. I ended up with many unneeded 207 MB Conner drives. So, I decided to max out my machine by adding 5 of them. I could not find a SCSI ribbon cable for 7 internal drives, so I was forces to make my own. I think I destroyed 3-4 of them before I finally made one that would work. Also, there were not enough power connectors available, so I had to get the wiring schematic and figure which connectors I could splice into. Eventually, the task was complete, and I fired it up ".....hard drive failure....". It turns out that none of the drives actually spin up at the same same exact time. The Conners would wake first and report in, but the Boot drive was not ready, thus the error. To make a long story short, I would have to boot, get the error, hit the reset, get the drives all spinning, then quickly turn the power off/on quickly (before the drives quit spinning). I reordered the drives, used a Conner for the boot drive, and eventually got it to only require one extra boot to get the Seagate and Quantum to show up. All of this for a little over a Gigabyte! Boy, things sure have improved!
