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Domain: cinonic.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to cinonic.com.
Stories · 1
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Fibre Channel For The Masses
Diesel Dave writes: "Fibre Channel is an awesome technology handling serial Gigabit transmission rates of both SCSI and IP over up to 30 Meters of 2 pair Copper or 10 Kilometers of optical cable, with up to 126 hosts or devices per loop.(WOW!) The newest FC runs at 2GHz. That's up to 400 Megabytes per second in full duplex mode. The problem of course is FC is normally very expensive. However, many of the hackers out there have noticed large amounts 1GHz FC equipment is being dumped on Ebay for a song. (I purchased new 18GB Barracuda drives for $70 each!) The problem is cabling up those funky 40 pin SCA drives without buying a $3000 8 bay enclosure. After much searching I have just found a company called Cinonic Systems that is making low cost Fibre Channel drive and cable adapters that work with plain old CAT5 ethernet cable! As far as I'm concerned firewire, parallel SCSI, and Gigabit ethernet are now dead technologies." It's not all that big a device either -- probably Cinonic is not alone in selling such a thing. Rather cool to connect up hard drives with CAT5, too -- not PITA ribbon cables.