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.

Comments

Fibre Channel does NOT imply optical cable

[kelleher]

Here is a quick read on fibre channel including specifications for copper wire, coaxial wire, multi-mode fiber, and single-mode fiber. For more info, check the Fibre Channel Industry Association site.

Come on people! Do your homework before you start whining!

Same IP address?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cinonic is the name of the company selling the devices.

psychosis.com is the email address domain of the submitter.

www.cinonic.com and www.psychosis.com have the same IP address.

Whois data for both domains shows the same individual involved with both.

cinonic and you'll have to type psychosis.com

Suspicious or coincidence?

That giant sucking sound...

[Brento]

you just heard is thousands of /. users starting up new browsers to search for 18gb FC drives for $70. Man, if I got a deal like that, I'd resell 'em to my boss for $400 and we'd both be ecstatic.

Optical components

[tenzig_112]

Everyone talks about fibre as the Cadillac solution (because it costs about as much as a caddy per station). But there are a lot more elements to consider other than the drive bay adapters. Just getting the optical cable installed with its various freaky components drive up the cost in a hurry.

Fibre is also a solution with few big players- and loads of tiny less-stable providers. I don't want to get stuck on the bleeding edge with a company with a crappy web site [cough. Cionic. Cough.]

[I'm sure cionic is getting slashdotted right now. And from a quick check of network solutions, it seems that the poster has a vested interest in that.]

don't believe the hype

This isn't the whole solution...

[Jay Maynard]

While it looks like Cinonic has handled the drive end of the connection, this doesn't do anything for the host bus adapter end. Fiber Channel HBAs are still pretty expen$ive, especially if you have to add a copper GBIC to them. There's also the issue of drivers for Linux (hey, this is Slashdot, after all); while there are some fiber channel drivers in the tree, there are more out there. Be careful before you drop a lot of bucks on FC drives and adapters to make sure you can get an HBA that you will be able to use for your system.
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After much searching?

[zsazsa]

Diesel Dave writes: "... 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! ..."

Diesel Dave's email address is dave@psychosis.com.

A WHOIS lookup for cinonic.com: Registrant:
David Cinege
100 PerCenta, Notsure Blvd.
Someplacen, FL 33300
US

... and further down ...
Administrative Contact:
Cinege, David dcinege@psychosis.com

I really hope this is either a coincidence or Dave here is just doing the company a favor by registering a domain and hosting it for them after searching so far and wide for them.

zsazsa